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THE ORIGINS AND DESTINY 
OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 




J. A. CRAMB 



THE 
ORIGINS AND DESTINY 

OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

AND 

NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 



^Y THE LATE 



J«^^RAMB, M,A. 

PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, QUEEN'S COLLEGE, LONDON 
AUTHOR OF "GERMANY AND ENGLAND" 



WITH A MEMOIR AND PORTRAIT 
OF THE AUTHOR 



NEW YORK 
E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

681 Fifth Avenue 



< 



Copyright, 1915 



E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



FEB 27 (915 

©GI,A397586 



.^^ 



"For the noveltie and strangenesse of the matter which I 
determine and deliberate to entreat upon, is of efficacie and 
force enough to draw the mindes both of young and olde to 
the diligent reading and digesting of these labours. For what 
man is there so despising knowledge, or any so idle and 
slothfull to be found, which will eschew or avoide by what 
policies or by what kinde of government the most part of 
nations of the universall world were vanquished, subdued 
and made subject unto the one empire of the Romanes, which 
before that time was never seen or heard? Or who is there 
that hath such earnest affection to other discipline or studie, 
that he suposeth any kind of knowledge to be of more value 
or worthy to be esteemed before this?" 

Histories of the most famous Chronographer, Polybius. 
(Englished by C. W., and imprinted at London, Anno 1568.) 



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

John Adam Cramb was born in 1862. He was 
educated at Glasgow and Bonn Universities. In 
1885 he graduated at Glasgow, taking First Class 
Honours in Classics, and in the same year was ap- 
pointed to the Luke Fellowship in English Litera- 
ture. He subsequently travelled on the Continent, 
and in 1887 married the third daughter of the late 
Mr. Edward W. Selby Lowndes, of Winslow, and 
left one son. From 1888 to i8go he was Lecturer 
in Modern History at Queen Margaret College, 
Glasgow. Settling in London in 1890 he contrib- 
uted several articles to the Dictionary of National 
Biography, and also occasional reviews to periodi- 
cals. For many years he was an examiner for the 
Civil Service Commission. In 1892 he was ap- 
pointed Lecturer and in 1893 Professor of Modern 
History at Queen's College, London, where he lec- 
tured until his death. He was also an occasional 
lecturer on military history at the Staff College, 
Camberley, and at York, Chatham, and other centres. 
In London he gave private courses on history, 
literature, and philosophy. His last series of lec- 
tures was delivered in February and March, 19 13, 
the subject being the relations between England and 



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Germany. In response to many requests he was 
engaged in preparing these lectures for publication 
when, in October, 191 3, he died. 



PREFACE 

The following pages are a reprint of a course of 
lectures delivered in May, June, and July, 1900. 
Their immediate inspiration was the war in South 
Africa (two of the lectures deal directly with that 
war), but in these pages, written fifteen years ago, 
will be found foreshadowed the ideals and deeds of 
the present hour. The last chapter — " Nineteenth 
Century Europe" — was written by Mr. Cramb for 
the Daily News Special Number for December 31st, 
1900. In it he presents a survey of the political 
events and tendencies throughout Europe during 
the nineteenth century. He outlines the develop- 
ment of the New German Empire from the war 
against Napoleon down to the days of Bismarck 
and Wilhelm II, and shows how the Russian general 
Skobeleff, the hero of Plevna and the Schipka Pass, 
foretold over thirty years ago the present death- 
struggle between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Eu- 
rope. The future roles of France, Italy, and Spain 
are also clearly indicated by the author. 

When the book first appeared, Mr. Cramb wrote 
that he " had been induced to publish these reflec- 
tions by the belief or the hope that at the present 
grave crisis they might not be without service to 



PREFACE 

his country." His lectures are now reprinted in the 
hope that they may be " not without service " to the 
whole EngHsh-speaking world. 



CONTENTS 

PART I 
THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

What is Imperialism? i 

1. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HIS- 

TORY 4 

2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM . . .II 

3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY I9 

CHAPTER II 

The Development of the Political Ideal . 25 

i. of the action of states and of individuals 2.j 

2. the law of tragedy as applied to history . 3 1 

3. the law of tragedy : its second aspect . . 42 

CHAPTER HI 

The Development of the Religious Ideal . 57 

1. religion and imperialism 58 

2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY . 6o 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS 66 

4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH 

REFORMATION 70 

5. THE TESTIMONY OT THE PAST: A FINAL CON- 

SIDERATION 83 



PART II 

THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

CHAPTER IV 

The War in South Africa . . , . . 91 

1. historical significance of the war in 

south AFRICA 92 

2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM 95 

3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY lOI 

4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM . . . .Ill 

5. MILITARISM 113 

CHAPTER V 

What is War? 117 

i. the place of war in world-history . . .117 

2. definition of war 126 

3. count tolstoi and carlyle upon war . . i29 

4. count tolstoi as representative of the 

slavonic genius i34 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR . . . I39 

6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE . . . .143 

7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR 1 54 



CHAPTER VI 

It 
The Vicissitudes of States and Empires . 159 

1. THE metaphysical ORIGIN OF THE STATE . . l6o 

2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART 167 

3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF 

RETRIBUTION 1/3 

4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY . 1 78 

5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE " FALL OF AN EM- 

PIRE " ? . . ., 186 



CHAPTER Vn 

The Destiny of Imperial Britain and the 
Destiny of Man 198 

1. the present stage in the history of im- 

perial BRITAIN 200 

2. the destiny of man 207 

3. the four periods of modern history and 

their ideals 211 

4. the ideal of the fourth age 219 

5. the " ACT " and the " THOUGHT "... 227 

6. Britain's world-mission: the witness of 

the dead to the mandate of the pres- 
ENT 230 



CONTENTS 
PART III 

NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 



CHAPTER VIII 

CHAPTER PAGE 

1. DOMINION" OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY . . . 243 

2. NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM . 257 

3. THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE 2/2 



PART I 
THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST 



l^^ 



THE ORIGINS AND DESTINY 
OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

CHAPTER I 

WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

The present age has rewritten the annals of the 
world, and set its own impress on the traditions of 
humanity. In no period has the burden of the past 
weighed so heavily upon the present, or the inter- 
pretation of its speculative import troubled the heart 
so profoundly, so intimately, so monotonously. 

How remote we stand from the times when 
Raleigh could sit down in the Tower, and with less 
anxiety about his documents, State records, or stone 
monuments than would now be imperative in com- 
piling the history of a county, proceed to write the 
History of the World ! And in speculation it is the 
Tale, the fabula, the procession of impressive inci- 
dents and personages, which enthralls him, and with 
perfect fitness he closes his work with the noblest 
Invocation to Death that literature possesses. But 
beneath the variety or pathos of the Tale the present 
age ever apprehends a deeper meaning, or is op- 



2 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? , 

pressed by a sense of mystery, of wonder, or of sor- 
row unrevealed, which defies tears. 

This revolution in our conception of History, this 
boundless industry which in Germany, France, Eng- 
land, Italy, has led to the printing of mountains of 
forgotten memoirs, correspondences. State papers, 
this endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above 
riches of the slight results slowly and patiently 
drawn, is neither accident, nor transient caprice, nor 
antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding im- 
pulse, the supreme instinct of this age — the ardour 
to know all, to experience all, to be all, to suffer all, 
in a word, to know the Truth of things — if haply 
there come with it immortal life, even if there come 
with it silence and utter death. The deepened sig- 
nificance of history springs thus from the deepened 
significance of life, and the passion of our interest 
in the past from the passion of our interest in the 
present. The half -effaced image on a coin, the il- 
luminated margin of a mediaeval manuscript, the 
smile on a fading picture — if these have become, 
as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuat- 
ing the Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, 
it is a power from the present that invests them with 
this magic. Life has become more self-conscious; 
not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper 
Self, the mystic Presence which works behind the 
veil. 

World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end 
is death, but laden with eternal meanings, signifi- 



=^ IMPERIAL BRITAIN 3 

cances, intimations, swift gleams of the Timeless 
manifesting itself in Time. And the distinguishing 
function of History as a science lies in its ceaseless 
effort not only to lay bare, to crystallise the mo- 
ments of all these manifestations, but to discover 
their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to 
each other and to the One, the hidden source of 
these varied manifestations, whether revealed as 
transcendent thought, art, or action. 

Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry 
into the origin of the French Monarchy or the de- 
cline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not only the 
characters, incidents, policies immediately connected 
with the subject, but attempted an answer to the 
question — What is the place of these incidents in 
the universal scheme of things ? so in the treatment 
of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial 
Britain, pursuing a similar plan, we have to consider 
not merely the relations of Imperial Britain to the 
England and Scotland of earlier times, but its rela- 
tions to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far 
as is possible its place amongst the world-empires of 
the past. I use the phrase " Imperial Britain," and 
not " British Empire," because from the latter, ter- 
ritorial associations are inseparable. It designates 
India, Canada, Egypt, and the Hke. But by " Im- 
perial Britain " I wish to indicate the informing 
spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, 
which in the past has shapen and in the present con- 
tinues to shape this outward, this material frame of 



4 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

empire. With the rise of this spirit, this conscious- 
ness within the British race of its destiny as an im- 
perial people, no event in recent history can fitly 
be compared. The unity of Germany under the 
Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching achieve- 
ment. The aspirations of the period of the Aitf- 
kldrung — Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte — 
find in this edifice their political realisation. But 
the incident is not unprecedented. Even the writ- 
ings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made obsolete. 
It has affected the European State-system as the 
sudden unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the com- 
pletion of the French Monarchy under Louis XIV 
affected it. But in this unobserved, this silent 
growth of Imperial Britain — so unobserved that 
it presents itself even now as an unreal, a transient 
thing — a force intrudes into the State-systems of 
the world which, whether we view it in its effects 
upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance 
to the future, has few, if any, parallels in history. 

§ I. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN 
HISTORY 

What is the nature of this Consciousness ? What 
is its historical basis? Is it possible to trace the 
process by which it has emerged? 

In the history of every conscious organism, a race, 
a State, or an individual, there is a certain moment 
when the Unconscious desire, purpose, or ideal 



THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY 5 

passes into the Conscious. Life's end is then mani- 
fest. The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly dis- 
cerned, now becomes the fixed law of existence. 
Such moments inevitably are difficult to localise. 
Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger Robes- 
pierre — " He has so much of the future in his 
mind." But it is neither Toulon, nor Vendemiaire, 
nor Lodi, but the marshes of Areola, two years after 
Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal 
Napoleon to himself. So Diderot perceives the 
true bent of Rousseau's genius long before the 
Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and to 
France. Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus 
and of Mylae the beginning of Rome's imperial ca- 
reer, but a juster instinct leads Livy to devote his 
most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat 
of Thrasymene and Cannse, It was the singular 
fate of Camoens to voice the ideal of his race, to 
witness its glory, and to survive its fall. The prose 
of Osorius ^ does but prolong the echoes of Camo- 

1 The Latin work of Osorius, De rebus gestis Emmanuelis 
regis Lusitaniae, appeared in 1574, two years later than Os 
Lusiadas. The twelve books of Osorius cover the twenty-six 
years between 1495 and 1521, thus traversing parts of the same 
ground as Camoens. But the hero of Osorius is Alboquerque. 
His affectation of Ciceronianism, the literary vice of the age, 
casts a suspicion upon the sincerity of many of his epithets and 
paragraphs, yet the work as a whole is composed with his 
eyes upon his subject. Seven years after the Latin, a French 
translation, a beautifully printed foHo from Estienne's press, 
was published, containing eight additional books, by Lopez de 
Castanedo and others, bringing the history down to 1529. 



6 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

ens' mighty line. Within a single generation, Por- 
tugal traces the bounds of a world-empire, great 
and impressive; the next can hardly discover the 
traces. But to the limning of that sketch all the 
past of Portugal was necessary, though then it 
emerged for the first time from the Unconscious 
to the Conscious. Similarly in the England of the 
seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve 
to be itself the master of its fate takes complete 
possession of the nation. This is the ideal which 
gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to 
the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Res- 
toration to the "principles of 1640"; it is this 
which gives a common purpose to the lives of Eliot, 
Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers. It is the unifying 
motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth cen- 
tury. The eighteenth expands or curtails this, but 
originates nothing. An ideal from the past controls 
the genius of the greatest statesmen of the eight- 
eenth century. But from the closing years of the 
century to the present hour another ideal, at first 
existing unperceived side by side with the former, 
has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its 
origins and little regarded in its first developments, 
but now impressing the whole earth by its majesty 
— the Ideal of Imperial Britain. 

It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix 
precisely the first beginnings of great movements in 
history. Nevertheless it is often convenient to se- 
lect for special study even arbitrarily some incident 



THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY 7 

or character in which that movement first conspicu- 
ously displays itself. And if the question were 
asked — When does monarchical or constitutional 
England first distinctively pass into Imperial Brit- 
ain? I should point to the close of the eighteenth 
century, to the heroic patience with which the 
twenty-two years' war against France was borne, 
hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss 
of an empire; and further, if you proceeded to 
search in speculative politics or actual speeches for 
a deliberate expression of this transition, I should 
select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's 
great impeachment of Warren Hastings. There 
this first awakening consciousness of an Imperial 
destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pro- 
nounced form indeed,. Yet Burke's range in specu- 
lative politics, compared with that of such a writer 
as Montesquieu, is narrow. His conception of his- 
tory at its highest is but an anticipation of the pic- 
turesque but pragmatic school of which Macaulay 
is coryph^us. In religion he revered the traditions, 
and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time. 
His literary sympathies were less varied, his taste 
less sure than those of Charles James Fox. In con- 
stitutional politics he clung obstinately to the ideals 
of the past ; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile 
or indifferent. As Pitt was the first great states- 
man of the nineteenth century, so Burke was the 
last of the great statesmen of the seventeenth cen- 
tury; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury 



8 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly 
belongs. But if his range was narrow, he is master 
there. " Within that circle none durst walk but he." 
No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler 
rhetoric, a mightier language. And if he is a re- 
actionary in constitutional politics, in his impeach- 
ment of Hastings he is the prophet of a new era, 
the annunciator of an ideal which the later nine- 
teenth century slowly endeavours to realise — an 
empire resting not on violence, but on justice and 
freedom. 

This ideal influences the action, the policy, of 
statesmen earlier in the century ; but in Chatham its 
precise character, that which differentiates the ideal 
of Britain from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than 
in Burke. And in the seventeenth century, unless 
in a latent unconscious form, it can hardly be traced 
at all. In the speculative politics of that century we 
encounter it again and again; but in practical poli- 
tics it has no part. I could not agree with Lord 
Rosebery when in an address he spoke of Cromwell 
as " a great Briton." Cromwell is a great English- 
man, but neither in his actions nor in his policy, 
neither in his letters, nor in any recorded utterance, 
public or private, does he evince definite sympathy 
with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal 
of Imperial Britain. His work indeed leads 
towards this end, as the work of Raleigh, of the 
elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but 
not consciously, not deliberately. 



THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY 9 

In Burke, however, and in his younger contem- 
poraries, the conscious influence, the formative 
power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations than 
moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can 
no longer escape us. The Empire is being formed, 
its material bounds marked out, here definitely, 
there lost in receding vistas. On the battlefield or 
in the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant 
adventurers, this work is slowly elaborating itself. 
And within the nation at large the ideal which is 
to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into 
ever clearer consciousness. Its influence throws a 
light upon the last speeches of the younger Pitt. 
If the Impeachment be Burke's chef d'oeuvre, Pitt 
never reached a mightier close than in the speech 
which ended as the first grey light touched the east- 
ern windows of Westminster, suggesting on the in- 
stant one of the happiest and most pathetic quota- 
tions ever made within those walls.^ The ideal 

2 The first of Pitt's two remarkable speeches in the great de- 
bate of April, 1792, on the Abolition of the Slave-trade was 
made on April 2nd. Pitt, according to a pamphlet report 
printed by Phillips immediately afterwards, rose after an all- 
night sitting to speak at four o'clock on Tuesday morning 
(April 3rd). The close of the speech is thus reported: "If 
we listen to the voice of reason and duty, and pursue this night 
the line of conduct which they prescribe, some of us may live 
to see a reverse of that picture, from which we now turn our 
eyes with pain and regret. We may live to behold the natives 
of Africa engaged in the calm occupations of industry, in the 
pursuits of a just and legitimate commerce. We may behold 
the beams of science and philosophy breaking in upon their 



lo WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

makes great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Can- 
ning; and Clarkson, Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is 
each in his way its exponent. " The Cry of the 
Children " derived an added poignancy from the 
wider pity which, after errors and failures more 
terrible than crimes, extended itself to the suffering 
in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by 
the Nile. The Chartist demanded the Rights of 
Englishmen, and found the strength of his demand 
not diminished, but heightened, by the elder battle- 
land, which at some happy period in still later times may blaze 
with full lustre, and joining their influence to that of pure re- 
ligion, may illumine and invigorate the most distant extremi- 
ties of that immense continent. Then may we hope that even 
Africa, though last of all the quarters of the globe, shall enjoy 
at length, in the evening of her days, those blessings which 
have descended so plentifully upon us in a much earlier period 
of the world. Then also will Europe, participating in her im- 
provements and prosperity, receive an ample recompense for 
the tardy kindness (if kindness it can be called) of no longer 
hindering that continent from extricating herself out of the 
darkness which in other more fortunate regions has been so 
much more speedily dispelled — 

Non primus equis oriens afflavit anhelis, 

illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper. 
Then, Sir, may be applied to Africa those words, originally 
indeed used with a different view — 

His demum exactis — 

devenere locos laetos, et amoena vireta 

fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque beatas; 

largior hie campos aether, et lumine vestit 

purpureo." 
Pitt's second speech, of which only a brief impassioned frag- 
ment remains, was delivered on April 27th {Pari. Hist, xxix, 
pp. 1134-88). 



THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY ii 

cry of the " Rights of Man." Thus has this ideal, 
grown conscious, gradually penetrated every phase 
of our public life. It removes the disabilities of 
religion; enfranchises the millions, that they by 
being free may bring freedom to others. In the 
great renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from 
Roman annals, and sets the name of Peel with that 
of Caius Gracchus. It imparts to modern politics 
an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power 
to falter at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility. 

Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal 
of national and constituted freedom takes complete 
possession of the English people, so in the nineteenth 
this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from 
the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has 
gradually taken possession of all the avenues and 
passages of the Empire's life, till at the century's 
close there is not a man capable of sympathies be- 
yond his individual walk whom it does not strengthen 
and uplift. 

§ 2. ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM 

Definitions are perilous, yet we must now at- 
tempt to define this ideal, to frame an answer to 
the question — What is the nature of this ideal 
which has thus arisen, of this Imperialism which is 
insensibly but surely taking the place of the nar- 
rower patriotism of England, of Scotland, and of 
Ireland? Imperialism, I should say, is patriotism 
transfigured by a light from the aspirations of uni- 



12 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

versal humanity; it is the passion of Marathon, of 
Flodden or Trafalgar, the ardour of a de Montfort 
or a Grenville, intensified to a serener flame by the 
ideals of a Condorcet, a Shelley, or a Fichte. This 
is the ideal, and in the resolution deliberate and 
conscious to realise this ideal throughout its domin- 
ions, from bound to bound, in the voluntary sub- 
mission to this as to the primal law of its being, 
lies what may be named the destiny of Imperial 
Britain. 

As the artist by the very law of his being is com- 
pelled to body forth his conceptions in colour, in 
words, or in marble, so the race dowered with the 
genius for empire is compelled to dare all, to suffer 
all, to sacrifice all for the fulfilment of its fate-ap- 
pointed task. This is the distinction, this the char- 
acteristic of the empires, the imperial races of the 
past, of the remote, the shadowy empires of Media, 
of Assyria, of the nearer empires of Persia, Mace- 
don, and Rome. To spread the name, and with 
the name the attributes, the civilising power of 
Hellas, throughout the world is the ideal of Mace- 
don. Similarly of Rome: to subdue th"e world, to 
establish there her peace, governing all in justice, 
marks the Rome of Julius, of Vespasian, of Trajan. 
And in this measureless devotion to a cause, in this 
surplus energy, and the necessity of realising its 
ideals in other races, in other peoples, lies the dis- 
tinction of the Imperial State, whether city or na- 
tion. The origin of these characteristics in British 



ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM 13 

Imperialism we shall examine in a later lecture. 
Let me now endeavour to set the distinctive ideal 
of Britain before you in a clearer light. Observe, 
first of all, that it is essentially British. It is not 
Roman, not Hellenic. The Roman ideal moulds 
every form of Imperialism in Europe, and even to 
a certain degree in the East, down to the eighteenth 
century. The theory of the mediaeval empire de- 
rives immediately from Rome. The Roman justice 
disguised as righteousness easily warrants persecu- 
tion, papal or imperial. The Revocation of the 
Edict of Passau by a Hapsburg, and the Revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes by a Bourbon, trace their 
origin without a break to that emperor to whom 
Dante assigns so great a part in the Paradiso.^ 
Lord Beaconsfield, with the levity in matters of 
scholarship which he sometimes displayed, once 
ascribed the phrase imperium ac libertas to a Roman 
historian. The voluntary or accidental error is 
nothing; but the conception of Roman Imperialism 
which it popularised is worth considering. It is 
false to the genius of Rome. It is not that the 

3 Justinian not only in his policy but in his laws sums the 
history of the three preceding centuries, and determines the 
history of the centuries which follow. To Dante he repre- 
sents at once the subtleties of Jurisprudence and Theology. 
The Eagle's hymn in the Paradiso (Cantos xix, xx) defines 
the limitations and the glory of Roman and Mediseval Im- 
perialism.. The essence of the entire treatise De Monorchia is 
in these cantos ; and Canto vi, where Justinian in person 
speaks, is informed by the same spirit. 



14 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

phrase nowhere occurs in a Roman historian; but 
no statesman, no Roman historian, not Sulla, not 
Csesar, nor Marcus, could ever have bracketed these 
words. Imperium ac justitia he might have said; 
but he could never have used together the concep- 
tions of Empire and Freedom. The peoples sub- 
dued by Rome — Spain, Gaul, Africa — received 
from Rome justice, and for this gift blessed Rome's 
name, deifying her genius. But the ideal of Free- 
dom, the freedom that allows or secures for every 
soul the power to move in the highest path of its 
being, this is no pre-occupation of a Roman states- 
man! Yet it is in this ideal of freedom that the 
distinction, or at least a distinction of Modern, as 
opposed to Roman or Hellenic, Europe consists ; in 
the effort, that is to say, to spiritualise the concep- 
tion of outward justice, of outward freedom, to 
rescue individual life from the incubus of the State, 
transfiguring the State itself by the larger freedom, 
the higher justice, which Sophocles seeks in vain 
throughout Hellas, which Virgil in Rome can no- 
where find. The common traits in the Kreon of 
tragedy and the Kritias of history, in the hero of 
the ^neid and the triumvir Octavianus, are not 
accident, but arise from the revolt of the higher 
freedom of Art, conscious or unconscious, against 
the essential egoism of the wrong masking as right 
of the ancient State. And it is in the Empire of 
Britain that this effort of Modern Europe is real- 
ised, not only in the highest, but in the most original 



ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM 15 

and varied forms. The power of the Roman ideal, 
on the other hand, saps the preceding empires of 
Modern Europe down to the seventeenth century, 
the empire of the German Caesars, the Papacy itself, 
Venice, Spain, Bourbon France. Consider how 
completely the ideals of these States are enshrined 
in the De Monarchia, and how closely the De Mon- 
archia knits itself to Caesarian and to consular 
Rome! 

The political history of Venice, stripped of its 
tinsel and melodrama, is tedious as a twice-told tale. 
Her art, her palaces, are her own eternally, a treas- 
ury inexhaustible as the light and mystery of the 
waters upon which she rests like a lily, the changeful 
element multiplying her structured loveliness and 
the opalescent hues of her sky. But in politics Ven- 
ice has not enriched the world with a single inspir- 
ing thought which Rome had not centuries earlier 
illustrated more grandly, more simply, and with yet 
pro founder meanings. 

Spain falls, not as Carlyle imagines, because it 
" rejects the Faith proffered by the visiting angel " 
— a Protestant Spain is impossible — but because 
Spain seeks to stifle in the Netherlands, in Europe at 
large, that freedom which modern Europe had come 
to regard as dearer than life — freedom to worship 
God after the manner nearest to its heart. But 
disaster taught Spain nothing — 

As ^schylus says: 



i6 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

Alas, for mortal history! In happy fortune 

A shadow might overturn its height ; whilst of disaster 

A wet sponge at a stroke effaces the lesson; 

And 'tis this last I deem life's greater woe. 

The embittered wisdom of ^schylus, indeed, 
finds in all history no more shining comment than 
the decHne of Spain.* 

The gloomy resolution of the Austrian Ferdinand 

II, the internecine war of thirty years which he pro- 
vokes, sullenly pursues, and in dying bequeaths to 
his son, are visited upon his house at Leuthen, 
Marengo, Austerlitz, and in the overthrow of the 
empire devised ten centuries before by Leo III and 
Charlemagne. 

And with the Revocation, with Le Tellier and 
the Bull Unigenitus, the procession of the French 
kings begins, which ends in the Place de la Revolu- 
tion : — " Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven." 

* Portugal in the first half of the sixteenth century presents 
a further instance of an empire actuated by the same ideals as 
those of Spain. Within a single century, almost within the 
memory of a single life, Portugal appears successively as a 
strong united nation, an empire of great and far-stretched re- 
nown, and then, by a revolution in fortune of which there are 
few examples, as a vanquished and subject State. Her mer- 
chants were princes, her monarchs, John II, Emmanuel, John 

III, and Sebastian, were in riches kings of the kings of Europe. 
But during the brief period of Portugal's glory, tyranny and 
bigotry went hand in hand. To the pride of her conquista- 
dores was added the fanaticism of Xavier and his retinue, 
and in the very years when within the same region Baber and 
Akbar were raising the wise and tolerant administration of 
the first Moguls, the Inquisition, with its priests, incantations, 



ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM 17 

From this thraldom to the past, to the ideal of 
Rome, Imperial Britain, first amongst modern em- 
pires, completely breaks. For it is a new empire 
which Imperial Britain presents to our scrutiny, a 
new empire moulded by a new ideal. 

Let me illustrate this by a contrast — a contrast 
between two armies and what each brings to the 
vanquished. 

Who that has read the historian of Alva can 
forget the march of his army through the summer 
months some three hundred and thirty years ago? 
That army, the most perfect that any captain had 
led since the Roman legions left the world, defiles 
from the gorges of Savoy, and division behind di- 
vision advances through the passes and across the 
plains of Burgundy and Lorraine. One simile 
leaps to the pen of every historian who narrates 
that march, the approach of sorrte vast serpent, the 
glancing of its coils unwinding still visible through 
the June foliage, fateful, stealthy, casting upon its 
victim the torpor of its irresistible strength. And 
to the Netherlands what does that army bring? 

and torture-chambers, was established at Goa. The resem- 
blance in feature, bearing, and in character between the Gil- 
berts, the Grenvilles, and the Alboquerques and Almeidas is 
indisputable; but certain ineffaceable and intrinsic distinctions 
ultimately force themselves upon the mind. And these dis- 
tinctions mark the divergence between the fate and the designs 
of England and the fate and the designs of Lusitania, between 
the empire of Portugal and that of Britain. Indeed, upon the 
spirit of mediaeval imperialism the work of Osorius is hardly 
less illuminating than the deliberate treatise of Dante. 



i8 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

Death comes with it — death in the shape most cal- 
culated to break the resolution of the most daunt- 
less — the rack, the solitary dungeon, the awful ap- 
parel of the Inquisition torture-chamber, the auto- 
dtt'-fe, and upon the evening air that odour of the 
burning flesh of men wherewith Philip of Spain 
hallowed his second bridals. These things accom- 
pany the march of Alva. And that army of ours 
which day by day advances not less irresistibly 
across the veldt of Africa, what does that army por- 
tend? That army brings with it not the rack, nor 
the dungeon, nor the dread auto-da-fe; it brings 
with it, and not to one people only but to the vast 
complexity of peoples within her bounds, the assur- 
ance of England's unbroken might, of her devotion 
to that ideal which has exercised a conscious sway 
over the minds of three generations of her sons, and 
quickened in the blood of the unreckoned genera- 
tions of the past — an ideal, shall I say, akin to 
that of the prophet of the French Revolution, Did- 
erot, " elargisses Dieu!'' — to liberate God within 
men's hearts, so that man's life shall be free, of it- 
self and in itself, to set towards the lodestar of its 
being, harmony with the Divine. And it brings to 
the peoples of Africa, to whom the coming of this 
army is for good or evil so eventful, so fraught with 
consequences to the future ages of their race, some 
assurance from the designs, the purposes which this 
island has in early or recent times pursued, that the 
same or yet loftier purposes shall guide us still; 



ANCIENT AND MODERN IMPERIALISM 19 

whilst to the nations whose eyes are fastened upon 
that army it offers some cause for gratulation or re- 
lief, that in this problem, whose vast issues, vista 
receding behind vista, men so wide apart as Napo- 
leon I and Victor Hugo pondered spell-bound; that 
in this arena where conflicts await us beside which, 
in renunciation, triumph, or despair, this of to-day 
seems but a toy ; that in this crisis, a crisis in which 
the whole earth is concerned, the Empire has inter- 
vened, definitely and for all time, which more than 
any other known to history represents humanity, and 
in its dealings with race distinctions and religious 
distinctions does more than any other represent the 
principle that " God has made of one blood all the 
nations of the earth." 

§ 3. THE MANDATE OF DESTINY 

In these two armies then, and in what each brings 
to the vanquished, the contrast between two forms 
of Imperialism outlines itself sharply. The earlier, 
that of the ancient world, little modified by medi- 
aeval experiments, limits itself to concrete, to exter- 
nal justice, imparted to subject peoples from above, 
from some beneficent monarch or tyrant; the later, 
the Imperialism of the modern world, the Imperial- 
ism of Britain, has for its end the larger freedom, 
the higher justice whose root is in the soul not of 
the ruler but of the race. The former nowhere 
looks beyond justice ; this sees in justice but a means 
to an end. It aims through freedom to secure that 



20 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

men shall find justice, not as a gift from Britain, 
but as they find the air around them, a natural pres- 
ence. Justice so conceived is not an end in itself, 
but a condition of man's being. In the ancient 
world, government ever tends to identify itself with 
the State, even when, as in Rome or Persia, that 
State is imperial. In the modern, government with 
concrete justice, civic freedom as its aims, ever 
tends to become but a function of the State whose 
ideal is higher. 

The vision of the De Monarchia — one God, one 
law, one creed, one emperor, semi-divine, far-off, 
immaculate, guiding the round world in justice, the 
crowning expression of Rome's ideal by a great poet 
whose imagination was on fire with the memory of 
Rome's grandeur — does but describe after all an 
exterior justice, a justice showered down upon men 
by a beneficent tyrant, a Frederick I, inspired by 
the sagas of Siegfried and of Charlemagne, or the 
second Frederick, the " Wonder of the World " to 
the thirteenth century, and ever alluring, yet ever 
eluding, the curiosity of the nineteenth; or a Henry 
VII, ineffectual and melancholic. Such " justice " 
passes easily by its own excess into the injustice 
which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre ex- 
pression in the phrase of " le Roi soleil," — " The 
State? I am the State." The ideal of modern life, 
the ideal of which Britain is the supreme representa- 
tive amongst existing empires, starting not from jus- 
tice but from freedom, may be traced beyond the 



THE MANDATE OF DESTINY 21 

French Revolution and the Reformation, back even 
to the command " Render unto Csesar." That 
word thrust itself like a wedge into the ancient unity 
of the State and God. It carried with it not merely 
the doom of the Roman Empire, but of the whole 
fabric of the ancient relations of State and Individ- 
ual. Yet Sophocles felt the injustice of this justice 
four centuries before, as strongly as Tertullian, the 
Marat of dying Rome, felt it two centuries after 
that command was uttered. 

Such then is the character of the ideal. And in 
the resolution as a people, for the furtherance of 
its great ends, to do all, to suffer all, as Rome re- 
solved, lies what may be described as the destiny of 
Imperial Britain. None more impressive, none lof- 
tier has ever arisen within the consciousness of a 
people. And to England through all her territories 
and seas the moment for that resolution is now. If 
ever there came to any city, race, or nation, clear 
and high through the twilight spaces, across the 
abysses where the stars wander, the call of its fate, 
it is NOW ! There is an Arab fable of the white 
steed of Destiny, with the thunder mane and the 
hoofs of lightning, that to every man, as to every 
people, comes once. Glory to that man, to that 
race, who dares to mount it! And that steed, is 
it not nearing England now? Hark! the ringing 
of its hoofs is borne to our ears on the blast! 

Temptations to fly from this decision, to shrink 
from the great resolve, to temporise, to waver, have 



22 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM?- 

at such moments ever presented themselves to men 
and to nations. Even now they present themselves, 
manifold, subtly disguised, insidiously persuasive, 
as exhortations to humility, for instance, as appeals 
to the deference due to the opinion of other States. 
But in the faith, the undying faith, that it, and it 
alone, can perform the fate-appointed task, dwells 
the virtue of every imperial race that History 
knows. How shall any empire, any state, conscious 
of its destiny, imitate the self-effacement prescribed 
to the individual — " In honour preferring one an- 
other " ? This in an imperial State were the pre- 
monition of decay, the presage of death. 

But there is one great pledge, a solemn warrant of 
her resolve to swerve not, to blench not, which Eng- 
land has already offered. That pledge is Elands- 
laagte, it is Enslin, the Modder, and the bloody 
agony of Magersfontein. For it grows ever clearer 
as month succeeds month that it is by the invincible 
force of this ideal, this of Imperial Britain, that we 
have waged this war and fought these battles in 
South Africa. If it be not for this cause, it is for 
a cause so false to all the past, from Agincourt to 
Balaklava, that it has but to be named to carry with 
it its own refutation. There is a kind of tragic ele- 
vation in the very horror of the march of Attila, 
of Ginghis Khan, or of Timour. But to assemble 
a host from all the quarters of this wide Empire, 
to make Africa, as it were, the rendezvous of the 
earth, for the sake of a few gold, a few diamond 



• THE MANDATE OF DESTINY- 23 

mines, what language can equal a design thus base, 
ambition thus sordid? And if we call to memory 
the dead who have fallen in this war, those who at 
its beginning were with us in the radiance of their 
manhood, but now, still in the grave, all traces of 
life's majesty not yet gone from their brow, and 
if those dead lips ask us, " Why are we thus? And 
in what cause have we died?" were it not a hard 
thing for Britain, for Europe, indeed for all the 
world, if the only answer we could make to the 
question should be, " It is for the mines, it is for the 
mines ! " No man can believe that ; no man, save 
him whose soul faction has sealed in impenetrable 
night! The imagination recoils revolted, terror- 
struck. Great enterprises have ever attracted some 
base adherents, and these by their very presence seem 
to sully every achievement recorded of nations or 
cities. But to arraign the fountain and the end of 
the high action because of this baser alloy ? To im- 
peach on this account all the valour, all the wisdom 
long approved ? Reply is impossible ; the thing sim- 
ply is not British. 

Indeed, in very deed, it is for another cause, and 
for another ideal — an ideal that, gathering to itself 
down the ages the ardour of their battle-cries, falls 
in all the splendour of a new hope about the path of 
England now. For this these men have died, from 
the first battle of the war to that fought yesterday. 
And it is this knowledge, this certainty, which gives 
us heart to acquiesce, as each of us is compelled to 



24 WHAT IS IMPERIALISM? 

acquiesce, in the presence of that army in South 
Africa. They have fallen, fighting for all that has 
made our race great in the past, for this, the man- 
date of destiny to our race in the future. They 
have fallen, those youths, self -devoted to death, with 
a courage so impetuous, casting their youth away as 
if it were a thing of no account, a careless trifle, 
life and all its promises ! But yesterday in the flush 
of strength and beauty; to-night the winds from 
tropic seas stir the grass above their graves, the 
southern stars look down upon the place of their 
rest. For this ideal they have died — " in their 
youth," to borrow the phrase of a Greek orator, 
" torn from us like the spring from the year." 

Fallen in this cause, in battle for this ideal, be- 
hold them advance to greet the great dead who fell 
in the old wars! See, through the mists of time, 
Valhalla, its towers and battlements, uplift them- 
selves, and from their places the phantoms of the 
mighty heroes of all ages rise to greet these English 
youths who enter smiling, the blood yet trickling 
from their wounds ! Behold, Achilles turns, un- 
bending from his deep disdain; Rustum, Timoleon, 
Hannibal, and those of later days who fell at Brun- 
anburh, Senlac, and Trafalgar, turn to welcome the 
dead whom we have sent thither as the avant-garde 
of our faith, that in this cause is our destiny, in 
this the mandate of our fate. 



CHAPTER II 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

Man's path lies between the living and the dead, 
and History seems to move between two hemi- 
spheres that ever)rwhere touch yet unite nowhere, 
the Past, shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each mo- 
ment ends, the Future not less shadowy, vast, il- 
limitable, that at each moment begins. The ques- 
tion, "What is History?" is but the question, 
"What is Life?" transferred from the domain of 
the Present to the domain of the Past. To under- 
stand the whorl of a shell would require an intelli- 
gence that has grasped the universe, and for the 
knowledge of the history of an hour the aeons of 
the fathomless past were not excessive as a prelim- 
inary study. Massillon's injunction, " Look thou 
within," does but discover to our view in nerve-cen- 
tres, in emotional or in instinctive tendencies, hiero- 
glyphics graven by long vanished ancestral genera- 
tions. But Nature, to guard man from despair, has 
fashioned him a contemporary of the remotest ages. 
The beam of light, however far into space it travel, 
yet remains unsevered from the orb whence it 
sprang, and Man, the youngest-bom of Time, is yet 
one with the source whence he came. As age flies 

25 



26 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

past after age, the immanence of the Divine grows 
more, not less insistent. Each moment indeed is 
rooted in the dateless past inextricably; but to its 
interpretation the soul comes, a wanderer from aeons 
not less distant, laden with the presaging memories, 
experiences, innumerable auxiliaries unseen, which 
the past itself has supplied for its own conquest or 
that of the present. Trusting to these, man is un- 
moved at the narrowness of his conscious sover- 
eignty, as the eye is immoved at the narrow bounds 
that hedge its vision, and finds peace where he 
would otherwise have found but despair. 

Those affinities, those intimate relations of the 
past and present, are the basis of speculative poli- 
tics. A judgment upon a movement in the present, 
an opinion hazarded upon the curve which a state, 
a nation, or an empire will describe in the future, 
is of little value unless from a wide enough survey 
the clear sanction of the past can be alleged in its 
support. 

Assuming therefore that in the ideal delineated 
above we have the ideal of a race destined to Em- 
pire, and at last across the centuries grown con- 
scious of that destin}^, the question confronts us- — 
is it possible out of the past, not surveying it from 
the vantage-ground of the present merely, but as 
it were living into the present from the past, to fore- 
shadow the rise of this consciousness? Or turning 
back in the light of this consciousness to the past, 
is there offered by the past a justification of this in- 



PAST AND PRESENT 27 

terpretation of the present, of this movement styled 
" Imperialism " ? 

The heart of the matter lies in the transformation 
of mediaeval patriotism into modern imperiaHsm, in 
the evolution or development which out of the Eng- 
lishman of the earlier centuries has produced the 
Englishman of the present, moved by other and 
higher political ends. Is there any incident or se- 
ries of incidents in our history, of magnitude 
enough profoundly to affect the national conscious- 
ness, to which we may look for the causes, or for 
the formative spirit, of this change? And in their 
effect upon the national consciousness of Britain 
have these incidents followed any law traceable in 
other nations or empires? 

§ I. OF THE ACTION OF STATES AND OF 
INDIVIDUALS 

There is a kind of criticism directed against poli- 
tics which, year by year or month by month, makes 
the discovery that between the code which regulates 
the action of States and the code which regulates 
the actions of individuals divergencies or contradic- 
tions are constantly arising. War violates the or- 
dinances of religion; diplomacy, the ordinances of 
truth; expediency, those of justice. And the con- 
clusion is drawn that whatever be the softening in- 
fluences of civihsation upon the relations of private 
life, within the sphere of politics, barbarism, bru- 
tally aggressive or craftily obsequious, reigns un- 



28 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

disturbed. Era succeeds era, faiths rise and set, 
statesmen and thinkers, prophets and martyrs, act, 
speak, suffer, die, and are seen no more ; but, scorn- 
ful of all their strivings, the great Anarch still 
stands sullen and unaltered by the centuries. And 
these critics, undeterred by Burke's hesitation to 
" draw up an indictment against a whole nation," 
make bold to arraign Humanity itself, charging 
alike the present and the past with perpetual self- 
contradiction, an hypocrisy that never dies. 

Underlying this impeachment of Nations and 
States in their relations to each other the assump- 
tion at once reveals itself, that every State, whether 
civic, national, or imperial, is but an aggregate of 
the individuals that compose it, and should accord- 
ingly be regulated in its actions by the same laws, 
the same principles of conduct, as control the ac- 
tions of individuals. And he therefore is the great- 
est statesman who constrains the State as nearly as 
possible into the line prescribed to the individual — 
whatever ruin and disaster attend the rash adven- 
ture! The perplexity is old as the embassy of Car- 
neades, young as the self-communings of Mazzini. 

Yet certain terms, current enough amongst those 
who deliver or at least acquiesce in this indictment 
(such as " Organism " or " Organic Unity " as ap- 
plied to the State), might of themselves suggest a 
reconsideration of the axiom that the State is but 
an aggregate of individuals. The unity of an or- 
ganism, though arising from the constituent parts, 



STATES AND INDIVIDUALS 29 

is yet distinct from the unity of those parts. Even 
in chemistry the laws which regulate the molecule 
are not the laws which regulate the constituent 
atoms. And in that highest and most complex of 
all unities, the State, we find, as we might expect to 
find, laws of another range, and a remoter purport, 
obscurer to us in their origins, more mysterious in 
their tendencies, than the laws which meet us in the 
unities which compose it. In the region in which 
States act and interact, whether with Plato we re- 
gard it as more divine, or as Rousseau passionately 
insists, as lower, the laws which are valid must at 
least be other than the laws valid amongst individ- 
uals. The orbit described by the life of the State 
is of a wider, a mightier sweep than the orbit of 
the separate life. The life which the individual sur- 
renders to the State is not one with the life which 
he receives in return; yet even of this interchange 
no analysis has yet laid bare the conditions. 

These considerations are not designed to imply 
that in the relations between States the code of in- 
dividual ethics is necessarily annulled; but to sug- 
gest that the laws which regulate the actions or the 
suffering of States, as such, have too peremptorily 
been assumed to be, by nature and the ground-plan 
of the universe, identical with the laws of individual 
life, its actions or its sufferings, and that it is some- 
thing of a petitio principii, in the present stage of 
our knowledge, to judge the one by the standards 
applicable only to the other. 



30 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

The profoundest students of the actions of States 
have in all times been aware, not of the fixed an- 
tagonism, but of the essential distinction, between 
the two codes. Every principle of Machiavelli is 
implicit in Thucydides, and Sulla, whom Montes- 
quieu selects as the supreme type of Roman gran- 
deur, does but follow principles which reappear in 
the politics of an Innocent III or a Richelieu, a 
Cromwell or an Oxenstiern.^ The loss of Sulla's 
Commentaries^ is irreparable as the loss of the fifth 
book of the Annals of Tacitus or the burnt Memoirs 
of Shaftesbury; in the literature of politics it is a 
disaster without a parallel. What Sulla felt as a 
first, most living impulse appears in later times as 
a colder, a critical judgment. It is thus that it pre- 
sents itself to Machiavelli, not the writer of that 
jeu d' esprit, II Principe, perplexing as Hamlet, and 
as variously interpreted, but the author of the 
stately periods of the Istorie and the Disc or si, the 

^ Goethe asserts that Spinozism transmuted into a creed by- 
analytic reflection is simply Machiavellism. 

6 The twenty-two books of Sulla's Memoirs, rerum suarum 
gestarum commentarii, were dedicated to his friend Lucullus ; 
they were still in existence in the time of Tacitus and Plu- 
tarch, though the fragments which now remain serve but to 
mock us with regret for the loss. Of Sulla's verses — like 
many cultured Romans of that age, the conqueror of Caius 
Marius amused his leisure with writing Greek epigrams — 
exactly so much has survived as of the troubadour songs of 
Richard I of England, or of Frederick II of Jerusalem and 
Sicily. Sulla's remarks on the young Caesar is for the youth 
of Caius Julius as illuminating as Richelieu's on Conde or of 
Pasquale Paoli's on Bonaparte. 



STATES AND INDIVIDUALS 31 

haughtiest of speculators, and in poHtics the pro- 
foundest of modern thinkers. M. Sorel encounters 
Httle difficulty in proving that the diplomacy of Eu- 
rope in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is 
but an exposition of the principles of the Discorsi; 
Frederick the Great, who started his literary activ- 
ity by the refutation of the Prince, began and ended 
his political career as if his one aim were to illus- 
trate the maxims that in the rashness of inexperi- 
ence he had condemned ; and within living memory, 
the vindicator of Oliver Cromwell found in the com- 
position of the same Frederick's history the solace 
and the torment of his last and greatest years. 

To press this inquiry further would be foreign to 
the present subject; enough has been said to indi- 
cate that from whatever deep unity they may spring, 
the laws which determine the life of a State, as 
displayed in History, are not identical with the laws 
of individual life. The region of Art, however, 
seems to offer a neutral territory, where it is pos- 
sible to obtain some perception, or Ahnung as a Ger- 
man would say, of the operation in the life of States 
of a law which bears directly upon the problem be- 
fore us. 

§ 2. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY AS APPLIED TO HISTORY 

In the history of past empires, their rise and 
decline, in the history of this Empire of Britain 
from the coming of Cerdic and Cynric to the 
present momentous crisis, there reveals itself a 



32 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

force, an influence, not without analogy to the influ- 
ence ascribed by Aristotle to Attic Tragedy. The 
function of Tragedy he defined as the purification 
of the soul by Compassion and by Terror — St' eAe'ou 
Kol <j)6(3ov KaOaparisJ Critics and commentators still 
debate the precise meaning of the definition ; but my 
interpretation, or application of it to the present in- 
quiry is this, that by compassion and terror the soul 
is exalted above compassion and terror, is lifted 
above the touch of pity or of fear, attaining to a 
state like that portrayed by Dante — 

lo son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale, 

Che la vostra miseria non mi tange 

Ne fiamma d' esto incendio non m' assale.^ 

In the tragic hour the soul is thus vouchsafed a 
deeper vision, discerns a remoter, serener, mightier 
ideal which henceforth it pursues unalterably, un- 
deviatingly, as if swept on by a law of Nature itself. 
Sorrow, thus conceived, is the divinest thought 
within the Divine mind, and when manifested in 
that most complex of unities, the consciousness of 
a State, the soul of a race, it assumes proportions 
that by their very vagueness inspire but a deeper 

''■ Aristotle refers only to the effect on the spectators ; but 
the continued existence of the State makes it at once actor 
and spectator in the tragedy. .The transforming power is thus 
more intimate and profound. 

s " God in His mercy such created me 
" That misery of yours attains me not, 
" Nor any flame assails me of this burning." 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 33 

awe, presenting a study the loftiest that can engage 
the human intellect. 

Genius for empire in a race supplies that impres- 
siveness with which a heroic or royal origin invests 
the protagonist of a tragedy, an Agamemnon or a 
Theseus. Hence, though traceable in all, the opera- 
tion of this law, analogous to the law of Tragedy, 
displays itself in the history of imperial cities or na- 
tions in grander and more imposing dimensions. 
Nowhere, for instance, are its effects exhibited in 
a more impressive manner than in the fall of Im- 
perial Athens — most poignantly perhaps in that 
hour of her history which transforms the char- 
acter of Athenian politics, when amid the happy 
tumult of the autumn vintage, the choric song, the 
procession, the revel of the Oschophoria, there came 
a rumour of the disaster at Syracuse, which, swiftly 
silenced, started to life again, a wild surmise, then 
panic, and the dread certainty of ruin. That hour 
was but the essential agony of a soul-conflict which, 
affecting a generation, marks the transformation of 
the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and 
Kritias, into the Athens ^ of Plato and Isocrates, of 

9 In illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn 
between the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucyd- 
ides in the singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part 
assigned to Justice by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and 
unimpassioned — the author of the Politics — in the recur- 
rence throughout that work of such phrases as "The State 
which is founded on Justice alone can stand." " Man when 
perfected (reKeuffiv) is the noblest thing that lives, but sep- 



34 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

Demosthenes and Phocion. In the writings of such 
men, in their speculations upon politics, one pervad- 
ing desire encounters us, alike in the grave serenity 
of the Laws, the impassioned vehemence of the 
Crown, in the measured cadences of the Panegyric, 
the effort to lead Athens towards some higher enter- 
prise, to secure for Athens and for Hellas some 
uniting power, civic or imperial, another empire 
than that which fell in Sicily, and moved by a loftier 
ideal. The serious admiration of Thucydides for 
Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's 
appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these 
are not renegadism, not disloyalty to Athens, but 
fidelity to another Athens than that of Kleon or of 
Kritias. History never again beheld such a band 
of pamphleteers ! ^^ 

arated from justice (x^pto'^ei' vonov koI 5t/ci?s) the basest of 
all." " Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor 
Justice the destruction of a City." The tragedies of Sopho- 
cles that are of a later date than 413 b. c. betray an attitude 
towards political life distinct from that which characterises 
his earlier works. The shading-in of the life of the State into 
that of the individual defies analysis, and it were hazardous to 
affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to the genius 
of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears as 
difficult to imagine before Syracuse, the vehement insistence 
upon Justice, the impassioned idealisation which characterise 
Plato, Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult after Syra- 
cuse to imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anax- 
agoras. 

10 The Greek orators and philosophers of the fourth century 
B. c. had before them a problem not without resemblances to 
that which confronted the Hebrew prophets of Judaea in the 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 35 

In the history of Rome, during the second war 
against Carthage, a similar moment occurs. After 
Cannse, Rome hes faint from haemorrhage, but rises 
a new city. The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus 
is greater than the Rome of the Decemvirs. It 
is not the inevitable change which centuries bring; 
another, a higher purpose has implanted itself 
within Rome's life as a State. The Rome of Grac- 
chus and of Drusus announces Imperial Rome, the 
Romfe of the Caesars. 

So in the history of Islam, from the anguish and 
struggles of the eighth century, the Islam of Haroun 
and Mutasim arises, imparting even to dying Per- 
sia, as it were, a second prime, by the wisdom and 
imaginative justice of its sway. 

In the development of Imperial Britain, the con- 
flict which in the life-history of these two States, 
Athens and Rome, has its essential agony at Cannae 
or at Syracuse, the conflict which affects the national 

seventh. Even their most speculative writings had a practical 
end, a goal which they considered attainable by Hellas, or by 
Athens. The disappearance of Socrates from the Laws, the 
increased seriousness of the treatment of Sparta and of Crete, 
the original and paragon of Lacedsemon, may indicate a con- 
cession to the prejudices of a generation which had grown up 
since Aegospotami, and a last efifort by Plato to bring his 
teaching home to the common life of Athens and of Hellas. 
So in the England of the seventeenth century the political 
writings of Bacon and Hobbes, of Milton and Harrington, 
though speculative in form, are most practical in their aims. 
Hobbes' first literary efifort, indeed, his version of Thucydides, 
is planned as a warning to England against civil discord and 
its ills. This was in 1628 — fatal date! 



36 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

consciousness as the hour of tragic insight affects 
the individual life, finds its parallel in the fifteenth 
century. After the short-lived glory of Agincourt 
and the vain coronation at Paris, humiliation fol- 
lows humiliation, calamity follows calamity. The 
empire purchased by the war of a century is lost in a 
day ; and England's chivalry, as if stung to madness 
by the magnitude of the disaster, turns its mutilating 
swords, like Paris after Sedan, against itself. The 
havoc of civil war prolongs the rancour and the 
shame of foreign defeat, so that Rheims, Chatillon, 
Wakefield, Barnet, and Tewkesbury, with other less 
remembered woes, seem like moments in one long 
tempest of fiery misery that breaks over England, 
stilled at last in the desperate lists at Bosworth. 

This period neglected, perhaps wisely neglected, 
by the political historian, is yet the period to which 
we must turn for the secret sources of that revolu- 
tion in its political character which, furthered by 
the incidents that fortune reserved for her, has grad- 
ually fashioned out of the England of the Angevins 
the Imperial Britain of to-day. 

In England it is possible to trace the operation 
of this transforming power, which I have compared 
to the transforming power of tragedy, in a very 
complete manner. It reveals itself, for instance, in 
two different modes or aspects, which, for the sake 
of clearness, may be dealt with separately. In the 
first of these aspects, deeply and permanently af- 
fecting the national consciousness, which as we have 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 37 

seen is distinct from the sum of the units composing 
it, the law of tragedy appears as the influence of 
suffering, of " terror " in the mystic transcendental 
sense of the word, of reverent fear, yet with it, 
serene and dauntless courage. This influence now 
makes itself felt in English politics, in English re- 
ligion, in English civic life. 

If we consider the history of England prior to 
this epoch, it might at first sight appear as if here 
were a race emphatically not destined for empire. 
Not in her dealings with conquered France, not in 
Ireland, not in Scotland, does England betray, in 
her national consciousness, any sympathy even with 
that aspiration towards concrete justice which 
marks the imperial character of Persia and of Rome. 
England seems fated to add but one record more to 
the tedious story of unintelligent tyrant States, 
illustrating the theme — v^Spts <j)VTev€t rvpawov — 
" insolence begets the tyrant ! " Even to her con- 
temporary, Venice, the mind turns from England 
with relief; whilst in the government of Khorassan 
by the earlier Abbassides we encounter an adminis- 
tration singularly free from the defects that vitiate 
Imperial Rome at its zenith. And now in the days 
of the first Tudors all England's efforts at empire 
have come to nothing. Knut's empire sinks with 
him; Norman and Plantagenet follow; but of their 
imperial policy the dying words of Mary Tudor, 
" Calais will be found graven on my heart," form 
the epitaph. It was not merely the loss of Calais 



38 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt In- 
stinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was 
an end to the empire which her house had inherited 
from Norman and Plantagenet, 

But in the national consciousness, the conscious- 
ness of the State, a change is now apparent. As 
Athens rose from Syracuse, a new Athens, as 
Rome rose from Cannae, a new city, to conquer by 
being conquered, so from the lost dreams of em- 
pire over France, over Scotland, England arises a 
new nation. This declares itself in the altered 
course of her policy alike in France, Ireland, and 
Scotland. In Ireland, for instance, an incomplete 
yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to 
bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless pop- 
ulation beyond the Pale. Henry VIII again, like 
Edward I, is a masterful king. In politics, in con- 
structive genius, he even surpasses Edward I. He 
abandons the folly of an empire in France, and 
though against Scotland he achieves a triumph sig- 
nal as that of Edward, he has no thought of revert- 
ing to the Plantagenet policy. He defeats the Scots 
at Flodden; but he has the power of seeing that in 
spite of his victory they are not defeated at all. 
King James IV lies dead there, with all his earls 
around him, like a Berserker warrior, his chiefs 
slain around him, " companions," comites indeed, 
in that title's original meaning. But the spirit of 
the nation is quickened, not broken, and Henry 
VIII, recognising this, steadily pursues the policy 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 39 

which leads to 1603, when these two peoples, by a 
mutual renunciation, both schooled in misery, and 
with the Hebrew phrase, " Well versed in suffering, 
and in sorrow deeply skilled," working so to speak 
in their very blood, are united. The Puritan wars, 
and the struggle for an ideal higher than that of 
nationality, cement the union. 

In the development of the life of a State, the dis- 
tance in time between causes and their visible effects 
often makes the sequence obscure or sink from sight 
altogether. As in geology the century is useless 
as a unit to measure the periods with which that 
science deals, and as in astronomy the mile is useless 
as a standard for the interstellar spaces; so in his- 
tory, in tracing the organic changes within the con- 
scious life of a State, the lustrum, the deksetis, or 
even the generation, would sometimes be a less mis- 
leading unit than the year. The England of Eliza- 
beth drew the first outline of the Empire of the fu- 
ture; but five generations were to pass before the 
Britain of Chatham ^^ could apply itself with a sin- 

11 The elder Pitt may be regarded as the first great minister 
of the English people as distinguished from men like Thomas 
Cromwell, Strafford, or Clarendon, who strictly were minis- 
ters of the king. " It rains gold-boxes," Horace Walpole 
writes when, in April, 1757, Pitt was dismissed, and it was 
these tokens of his popularity with the merchants of England, 
not the recognition of his genius by the king, which led to his 
return to office in June. The events of the period of four 
years and ten months during which this man was dictator of 
the House of Commons and of England are so graven on all 
hearts that a mere enumeration in order of time suffices to 



40 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

gle-hearted resolution to fill that outline in, and yet 
three other generations before this people as a whole 
was to become completely conscious of its high des- 
tiny. Freedom of religion and constitutional lib- 
erty had to be placed beyond the peril of encroach- 
ment or overthrow, before the imperial enterprise 
could be unreservedly pursued; but the deferment 
of the task has nerved rather than weakened the 
energy of her resolve. Had England fallen in the 
Marlborough wars, she would have left a name 
hardly more memorable than that of Venice or 
Carthage, illustrious indeed, but without a claim to 

recall moving incidents, characters, and scenes of epic gran- 
deur : — December 17th, 1756, Pitt-Devonshire ministry- 
formed, Highland regiments raised, national militia organ- 
ised. 1757, Clive's victory at Plassey, June 23rd, and con- 
quest of Bengal. 1758, June 3rd, destruction of forts at Cher- 
bourg, three ships of war, 150 privateers burned to the sea- 
line ; November 2Sth, Fort Duquesne captured ; December 29th, 
conquest of Goree. 1759, "year of victories"; February i6th, 
PococK relieves Madras; May ist, capture of Guadaloupe; 
July 4th, R. Rodney at Havre destroys the flat-bottomed Ar- 
mada; July 31st, Wolfe's repulse at Beaufort; August 19th, 
BoscAWEN destroys French fleet in Lagos Bay; September 
2nd, PococK defeats D'Ache; September 9th, Wolfe's last let- 
ter to Pitt ; September 13th, 10 A. m.. Plains of Abraham and 
conquest of Canada; November 20th, Hawke defeats Conflans 
in Quiberon Bay, " Lay me alongside the French Admiral." 
1760, January 22nd, Eyre-Coote defeats Lally at Wandewash, 
conquest of Carnatic. 1761, January i6th, English enter Pon- 
dicherry ; Bellisle citadel reduced, " Quebec over again," June 
7th; October 5th, Pitt resigns. It is doubtful whether, since 
the eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Con- 
queror, the European stage has been occupied simultaneously 
by two such men as Chatham and the king of Prussia. 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 41 

original or creative Imperialism. But if she were 
to perish now, it would be in the pursuance of a de- 
sign which has no example in the recorded annals 
of man. 

Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome 
which rose from Cann^ from the Rome which ad- 
ministered Egypt and Hispania. And in Islam four 
generations languish in misery before the true policy 
of the Abbassides displays itself, striking into the 
path which it never abandoned. 

In England then the influence of this epoch of 
tragic insight, and of its transforming force, ad- 
vances imperceptibly, unnoted across two genera- 
tions, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is 
unquestionable. The England which, towards the 
close of the eighteenth century, presents itself like 
a fate amongst the peoples of India, bears within 
itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it 
from the errors, and turn it from the path, which 
the England of the Plantagenets followed in Ire- 
land and in France. The national consciousness of 
England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering, 
its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there 
in India witliin the influence of that which in the 
life of a State, however little it may affect the indi- 
vidual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering. 
England stands then in the presence of a race whose 
life is in the memories of its past; its literature, its 
arts, its empires that rise and dissolve like dreams; 
its religions, its faiths, with all their strange analo- 



42 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

gies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern 
full of sounds. Hard upon this experience in In- 
dia comes that of the farther East, comes that of 
Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century. 
How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, 
the consciousness of a race, imparting to it forces 
from these wider horizons, deepening its own life 
by the contact with this manifold environment? He 
who might have been a de Mont fort, a Grenville, 
or a Raleigh, is now by these presences uplifted to 
other ideals, and by these varied and complex in- 
fluences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, 
raised from the sphere of concrete freedom and 
concrete justice to the higher realm ruled by 
imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which 
Sophocles, in the choral ode of the Oedipus, de- 
lineates, " the laws of sublimer range, whose home 
is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone." 

§ 3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY I ITS SECOND ASPECT 

The second mode or aspect in which the Law of 
Tragedy is applied to history reveals itself in the 
life of a State, corresponds to the moment of in- 
tenser vision in the individual life, when the soul, 
exalted by " compassion and terror," discerns the 
deeper truth, the serener ideal which henceforth it 
pursues as if impelled by the fixed laws of its being. 
There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes 
down the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the 
sound of the griding of the Spartan swords as they 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 43 

leapt from their scabbards on the morning of Ther- 
mopyte, the Ivipyeta TTJs ^vxrj<i — the energy of the 
soul. This energy of the soul in Aristotle is the 
vertu of Machiavelli, the spring of political wis- 
dom, the foundation of the greatness of a State. 
It is the immortal energy which arises within the 
consciousness of a nation, or in the soul of an indi- 
vidual, as the result of that hour of insight, of pity, 
of anguish, or contrition. It is the heroism which 
adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but ex- 
cites to yet sublimer daring. 

In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and 
in war, in the centuries that immediately succeed 
Cann^. Nothing in history is more worthy of at- 
tention than the impression which Rome in this 
epoch of her history made upon the minds of men, 
above all, upon the mind of Hellas. Its expression 
in Polybius is remarkable. 

Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on 
politics, has a place with the greatest political his- 
torians for all time. It was his work which 
Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger 
Pitt, as the supreme guide in political history. Poly- 
bius has every inducement to abhor Rome, to judge 
her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes. His 
father was the companion of Philopoemen, the 
heroic leader of the Achaean league, sometimes 
styled " the last of the Greeks," the Kosciusko of 
the old world, Polybius himself is a hostage in 
Rome, the representative of a defeated race, a lost 



44 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

cause; and yet after years of study of his conquer- 
ors, possessing every means for a just estimate of 
their actions and motives in the senate, on the bat- 
tlefield, in the intimacies of private life, the convic- 
tion of his heart becomes that there in Rome is a 
people divinely appointed to the government, not of 
Hellas merely, but of the w^hole earth. The mes- 
sage of his history, composed with scrupulous care, 
and a critical method rare in that age, is that the 
very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether 
she wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, 
that hers is the dominion of the earth, the empire 
of the world, and it is to the eternal honour of 
Greece that it accepted this message. The Romano- 
Hellenic empire is bom. Other men arise both to 
the east and to the west of the Adriatic, in whom 
the Greek and Roman genius are fused, who pur- 
sue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought 
which Polybius was the first to express immortally. 
It inspires the rhetoric of Cicero; and falls with a 
kind of glory on the verse of Virgil — 

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, 
credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus, 
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus 
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent: 
tu regere imperio populos Romane memento; 
hae tibi erunt artes ; pacisque imponere morem, 
parcere subjectis et debellare superbos. 

The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing 
idea of his parallel " Lives," and gives form and 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 45 

feature to a grandeur that else were incredible. It 
appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion 
Cassius, and in the fourth century forges some of 
the noblest verse of Claudian. And as we have 
seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after Claudian in 
the splendid eloquence of the De Monarchia, and 
yields such spent, such senile life as they possess, to 
the empires of Hapsburg and Bourbon. Thus this 
divine energy, which after Cannse uplifts Rome, 
riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome 
itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, un- 
til its last flicker in the eighteenth century. 

Where in the history of England, in the life of 
England as a State, does this energy, exalted by the 
hour of tragic vision, manifest itself? Recollect 
our problem ; it is by analysis, comparison, and con- 
trast, to discover what is the testimony of the past 
to Britain's title-deeds of empire. 

Great races, like great individuals, resemble the 
giants in the old myth, the gigantes, the earth-born, 
sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the wrestle, touched 
her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat. 
England stood this test in the sixteenth century, 
rising from that long humiliating war with France, 
that not less humiliating war with Scotland, greater 
than before her defeat. This energy of the soul, 
quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not 
merely in the Armada struggle but before that 
struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada Eng- 
land. 



46 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

The spirit of the sea- wolves of early times, of 
the sailors who in the fourteenth century fought at 
Sluys, and made the Levant an English lake, lives 
again in the Tudor mariners. But it has been trans- 
formed, and sets towards other and greater endeav- 
ours, planning a mightier enterprise. These adven- 
turers make it plain that on the high seas is the path 
of England's peace ; that the old policy of the Plan- 
tagenet kings, with all its heroism and indisputable 
greatness, has been a false policy; that England's 
empire was not to be sought on the plains of France ; 
that Gilbert, Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher have 
found the way to the empire w'hich the Plantagenets 
blindly groped after. 

As Camoens in Portugal invents a noble utterance 
for the genius of his nation, for the times of Vasco 
da Gama and of Emmanuel the Great, so this spirit 
of pre-Armada England, of England which as yet 
has but the memory of battles gained and lost wars, 
finds triumphant expression in Marlowe and his 
elder contemporaries. Marlowe's ^^ great dialect 
seems to fall naturally from the lips of the heroes 

12 The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, 
pulsate in the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but 
Marlowe was by far the wider in his intellectual range. 
Worlds were open to his glance beyond the Indies and Cathay . 
that were shut to Camoens. Yet Camoens is a heroic figure. 
He found it easy to delineate Vasco da Gama; he had but to 
speak with his own voice, and utter simply his own heart's 
desires, hates, musings, and Vasco da Gama's sister would 
have turned to listen, thinking she heard the accents, the trick, 
the very manner that betrayed the hero. 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 47 

of Hakluyt's Voyages, that work which still im- 
presses the imagination like the fragments of some 
rude but mighty epic, and in their company the ex- 
aggeration, the emphasis of Tamburlaine are hardly 
perceptible. In Martin Frobisher, for instance, 
how the purpose which determines his career il- 
lumines for us the England of the first years of 
Elizabeth! Frobisher in early manhood torments 
his heart with the resentful reflection, " What a 
blockish thing it has been on the part of England to 
permit the Genoese Columbus to discover Amer- 
ica!" That task was clearly England's! "And 
now there being nothing great left to be done," the 
sole work Frobisher finds worth attempting is 
the discovery of the northwest passage to Cathay. 
Upon this he spends the pith of his manhood year 
by year, and the result of all the labours of this sea- 
Hercules, well 1 it is perhaps to be sought in those 
dim beings, " half-man, half-fish," whom he brings 
back from some voyage, those forlorn Esquimaux 
who, seen in London streets, and long remembered, 
suggested to the dreaming soul of Shakespeare Cali- 
ban and his island. Frobisher's watchword on the 
high seas is memorable. In the northern latitudes, 
under the spectral stars, the sentinel of the Michael 
gives the challenge " For God the Lord," and senti- 
nel replies, " And Christ His Sonne." 

The repulse of Spain is but the culminating 
achievement of this energy of the soul which great- 
ens the life of England already in pre- Armada times. 



48 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

And simultaneously with the conflict against Spain 
this same energy attests its presence in a form as- 
suredly not less divine within the souls of those who 
rear that unseen empire, whose foundations are laid 
eternally in the thoughts of men, the empire reared 
by Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont, and Milton. 

In the seventeenth century it inspires the states- 
men of England not only with the ardour for con- 
stitutional freedom, but engages them in ceaseless 
and not unavailing efiforts towards a deeper concep- 
tion of justice and of liberty, foreshadowing uncon- 
sciously the ideals of later times. If the Thirty 
Years' War d,id nothing else for England it im- 
planted in her great statesmen a profound distrust 
of the imperial systems of the Bourbons and the 
Hapsburgs. Eliot, for instance, in the work entitled 
The Monarchy of Man, lofty in its form as in its 
thought, written in his prison, though studying 
Plato and the older ideals of empire, is yet obscurely 
searching after a new ideal. We encounter a simi- 
lar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that 
Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest 
love-songs in the language, capable also of some 
very vivid thoughts on statesmanship. In natures 
like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal de- 
termines the steadfastness of the action. And that 
ideal, I repeat, is distinct from Plato's, distinct from 
Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and Haps- 
burg empires, in which Dante's conception is but 
rudely or imperfectly developed. The ideal of 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 49 

these English statesmen is framed upon another 
conception of justice, another conception of free- 
dom, equally sublime, and more catholic and hu- 
mane. Whatever its immediate influence upon cer- 
tain of their contemporaries, over their own hearts 
it was all-powerful. The very vividness with which 
they conceive the ideal, and the noble constancy with 
which they pursue it, link the high purposes of these 
two men to the purposes of Milton, of Cromwell, 
of Selden, and of Falkland. The perfect State, the 
scope of its laws, government, religion, to each is 
manifest, though the path that leads thither may 
seem now through Monarchy, now through a Re- 
public, or at other times indistinct, or lost altogether 
in the bewildering maze of adverse interests. From 
the remote nature of their quest arises much of 
the apparent inconsistency in the political life of 
that era. The parting of Pym and Strafford ac- 
quires an added, a tragic poignancy from the con- 
sciousness in the heart of each that the star which 
leads him on is the star of England's destiny. 

Hence, too, the suspicion attached to men like 
Selden and Falkland of being mere theoricians in 
advance of their time, — an accusation fatal to 
statesmanship. But the advent of that age was 
marked by so much that was novel in religion, ^^ 

13 Burnet is incredibly vain, unredeemed by Boswell's hero- 
worship; yet his book reflects the medley, the fervour, the 
vehemence, crimes, hopes of this time. In one sentence nine- 
teen religions are named as co-existing in Scotland. 



50 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

in State, in foreign and domestic policy, the new 
direction of imperial enterprise, the unity of two 
nations, ancient and apparently irreconcilable foes, 
the jarring creeds, convulsing the life of both these 
nations, for both were deeply religious, that it were 
rash to accuse of rashness any actor in those times. 
But it is the adventurous daring of their spirits, the 
swift glance searching the horizons of the future, it 
is that very energy of the soul of which I have 
spoken which render these statesmen obnoxious to 
the suspicion of theory. The temper of Selden, in- 
deed, in harmony with the thoughtful and melan- 
choly cast of his features, disposed him to subtlety 
and niceness of argument, and with a division pend- 
ing, often deprived his words of a force which 
homelier orators could command. And yet his ca- 
reer is a presage of the future. Toleration in re- 
ligion, freedom of the press, the supremacy of the 
seas, the habeas corpus, are all lines along which 
his thought moves, not so much distancing as lead- 
ing the practical statesmen of his generation. And 
there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 
1649 of Edward Pococke's Arabic studies, which 
nearly a century and a half later were to form the 
basis of Gibbon's great chapters. But the year of 
Mare Clausum is at once the greatest in Selden's 
life, and the last months of greatness in the life of 
his royal master. ^^ 

14 The Mare Clausum was framed as an answer to Grotius' 
Mare Liberum, which had been printed, perhaps without Gro- 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 51 

But theory is a charge which has ever been urged 
against revolutionists. Revolution is the child of 
speculation. The men of the seventeenth century 

tius' consent, in 1610. Selden's tract, printed in November, 
163s, is a folio of 304 pages, in which, setting forth precedent 
on precedent, he claims for England, as by law and ancient 
custom established, that same supremacy over the high seas as 
the Portuguese had exercised over the eastern waters, and 
Venice over the Adriatic. The King's enthusiasm was kindled. 
The work was issued with all the circumstance of a State 
paper, and it came upon foreign courts like a declaration of 
policy, the resolve at length to enforce the time-honoured and 
indefeasible rights of England. Copies were with due cere- 
mony deposited in the Exchequer and at the Admiralty. A 
fleet was equipped, and as an atonement for the wrongs done 
to the elder Northumberland, the Kang gave the command to 
his son, whose portrait as Admiral forms one of the noblest 
of Vandyck's canvases. But Northumberland, though brave 
to a fault, was no seaman, and the whole enterprise threat- 
ened to end in ridicule. Stung to the quick, Charles again 
turned to the nation. But in the nine intervening years since 
1628 the nation's heart had left him. To his demand for sup- 
plies to strengthen the fleet came Hampden's refusal. The 
trial was the prelude to the Grand Remonstrance, to Naseby, 
and to Whitehall, where, as if swept thither by the crowded 
events of some fantastic dream, he awoke from his visions of 
England's greatness and the empire of the seas, alone on a 
scaffold, surrounded by a ring of English eyes, looking hate, 
sullen indifference, or cold resolution. 

Leave him still loftier than the world suspects, 

Living or dying. 
After all he was a king, and in his veins the blood of Mary 
Stuart still beat. An English version of Selden's treatise ap- 
peared in the time of Cromwell. The translator was March- 
amont Nedham. The dedication to the Supreme Authority of 
the Nation, the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England, 
is dated November 19th, 1652. 



52 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

are discoverers in politics. Their mark is a wider 
empire than that of Vasco da Gama and his king, a 
realm more wondrous than that of Aeetes. But 
Da Gama did not steer forthright to the Indies, nor 
Jason to the Colchian strand, though each knew 
clearly the goal he sought, just as Wentworth and 
Selden, Falkland and Montrose, Eliot and Milton, 
knew the State they were steering for, though each 
may have wavered in his own mind as to the course, 
and at last parted fatally from his companions. 
Practical does not always mean commonplace, and 
in the light of their deeds it seems superfluous to 
discuss whether the writer of Defensio pro Populo 
Anglicano, the destroyer of the Campbells, or the 
accuser of Buckingham, were practical politicians. 
In their lives, in the shaping of their careers, the 
visionary is actualized, the ideal real, in that fidelity 
of soul which leaves one dead on the battlefield, 
another on the gibbet, thirty feet high, " honoured 
thus in death," as he remarked pleasantly, a third 
to the dreary martyrdom of the Tower, a fourth to 
that ciread visitation, endured with stoic grandeur, 
and yet at times forcing from his lips the cry of 
anguish which thrills the verse of Samson Ago- 
nistes — 

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon. 
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse, 
Without all hope of day. 

But not in vain. The tireless centuries have accom- 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 53 

plished the task these men initiated, have travelled 
the path they set forth in, have completed the jour- 
ney which they began. 

We find the same pre-occupation, with some 
wider conception of justice, empire, and freedom in 
the younger Barclay, the author of Argenis, written 
in Latin but read in many languages, studied by 
Richelieu and moulding his later, wiser policy to- 
wards the Huguenots, read, above all, by Fenelon, 
who rises from it to write Telemaque. It meets us 
in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like 
Eliot's treatise, bears about it the air of a martyr's 
cell. We find it again explicitly in the Oceana of 
Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of Shaftes- 
bury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant ex- 
pression at last in the eloquence that was like a battle- 
cry, in the energy that at moments seems superhu- 
man, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the 
mightiest o-f all England''s statesmen-orators, the 
elder Pitt. It burns in clear flame in the men who 
come after him, in his own son, only less great than 
his great sire; in Charles James Fox and in Wind- 
ham, who in the great debate ^^ of 1801 fought 

15 The preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens were signed on 
October ist, 1801. Parliament opened on October 29th, and 
after the King's speech, Windham compared his position 
amid the general rejoicings of the House at the prospect of 
an end to the war, to Hamlet's at the wedding-feast of Clau- 
dius. In the debate of November 3rd, Pitt declared himself 
resigned to the loss of the Cape by the retention of Ceylon, 
while the opinion of Fox was, that by this surrender we should 



54 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

obstinately to save the Cape when Nelson and St. 
Vincent would have flung it away; in Canning, 
Wilberforce, in Romilly; in poets like Shelley, and 
thinkers like John Stuart Mill. 

The revolution in parliamentary representation 
during the present century, a revolution which, ex- 
tending over more than fifty years, from 1831 to 
1884, may even be compared in its momentous con- 
sequences with the revolution of 1640-88, though 
constitutional in design, yet forms an integral part 
of the wider movement whose course across the 
centuries we have indicated. The leaders in this 
revolution, men like Russell and Grey, complete the 
work which Eliot, Wentworth, and Pym began. 
They ask the question, else unasked, they answer the 
question, else unanswered — How shall a people, 
not itself free, a people disqualified and disfran- 

have the benefit of the colony without its expenses. Nelson, 
with the glory of his victory at Copenhagen just six months 
old, maintained that in the days when Indiamen were heavy 
ships the Cape had its uses, but now that they were coppered, 
and sailed well, the Cape was a mere tavern that served to 
delay the voyage. The opening of Windham's speech on the 
4th, " We are a conquered nation, England gives all, France 
nothing," defines his position {Pari. Hist, xxxvi, pp. 1-191). 
Windham was one of the few statesmen who, even before the 
consulate had passed into the Empire, understood the gravity 
of our relations to France. Every month added proof of the 
accuracy of his presentiments, but once understood by England 
there was no faltering. Prussia, Austria, the Czar, all 
acknowledged the new Empire, and made peace or alliance 
with its despot, but from the rupture of the Peace of Amiens 
England waged a war without truce till Elba and Ste. Helene. 



THE LAW OF TRAGEDY 55 

chised, become the harbinger of a new era to other 
peoples, or the herald of the higher freedom to the 
ancient races of India — Aryans, of like blood with 
our own, moving forever as in a twilight air, woven 
of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet unde- 
caying memories of their fabulous past — to the 
Moslem populations whose " Book " proclaimed the 
political equality of men twelve centuries before 
Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell ? 

This, then, is the testimony of the Past, and the 
witness of the Dead is this. Thus it has arisen, 
this ideal, the ideal of Britain as distinct from the 
ideal of Rome, of Islam, or of Persia — thus it has 
arisen, this Empire, unexampled in present and 
without a precedent in former times; for Athens 
under Pericles was but a masked despotism, and the 
republic-empire of Islam passed swifter than a 
dream. Thus it has arisen, this Imperial Britain, 
from the dark Unconscious emerging to the Con- 
scious, not like an empire of mist uprising under the 
wands of magic-working architects, but based on 
heroisms, endurances, lofty ideals frustrate yet im- 
perishable, patient thought slowly elaborating itself 
through the ages — the sea-wolves' battle fury, the 
splendour of chivalry, the crusader's dazzling hope, 
the immortal ardour of Norman and Plantag'enet 
kings, baffled, foiled, but still in other forms re- 
turning to uplift the spirit of succeeding times, the 
unconquered hearts of Tudor mariners rejoicing in 
the battle onset and the storm, the strung thought. 



56 THE POLITICAL IDEAL 

the intense vision of statesmen of the later cen- 
turies, Eliot, Chatham, Canning, and at the last, 
deep-toned, far echoing as the murmur of forests 
and cataracts, the sanctioning voices of enfran- 
chised millions accepting their destiny, resolute! 
This is the achievement of the ages, this the great- 
est birth of Time. For in the empires of the past 
there is not an ideal, not a structural design which 
these warriors, monarchs, statesmen have not, de- 
liberately or unconsciously, rejected, or, as in an 
alembic, transmuted to finer purposes and to nobler 
ends. 



CHAPTER III 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

In the history of the rehgion of an imperial race, it 
is not only the development of the ideal within the 
consciousness of the race itself that we have to con- 
sider, but the advance or decline in its conceptions 
of the religions of the peoples within the zone of its 
influence or dominion. For such a study the ma- 
terials are only in appearance less satisfactory th-an 
for the study of the political ideal of a race. It is 
penetratingly observed by La Rochefoucauld that 
the history of the Fronde can never be accurately 
written, because the persons in that drama were 
actuated by motives so base that even in the height 
of performance each actor of the deeds was striving 
to make a record of them impossible. The reflec- 
tion might be extended to other political revolu- 
tions, and to other incidents than the Fronde. 
Ranke's indefatigable zeal, his anxiety " in history 
always to see the thing as in very deed it enact-ed 
itself," never carried him nearer his object than the 
impression of an impression. No State papers, no 
documents, the most authentic, can take us further. 
But in this very strife, this zeal for the True, for- 
57 



58 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

ever baffled yet forever renewed, one of the noblest 
attributes of the present age discovers itself. Indis- 
putable facts are often the sepulchres of thought, 
and truth after all, not certainty, is the historian's 
goal. It might even be urged that the records of 
religion, the martyr's resolution, the saint's fervour, 
the reformer's aspiration, the prophet's faith, offer 
a surer hope of attaining this goal than the records 
of politics. 

§ I. RELIGION AND IMI^ERIALISM 

Religion forms an integral part of a nation's life, 
and in the development of the ideal of Imperial 
Britain on its religious side, the same transforming 
forces, the same energy of the soul, the operation of 
the same law analogous to the law of tragedy al- 
ready described, which manifest themselves in poli- 
tics, are here apparent. The persecuting intolerant 
England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
after passing through the Puritan struggle of the 
seventeenth, the scepticism or indifference of later 
times, appears at last in the closing years of the 
nineteenth century as the supreme representative, 
if not the creator, of an ideal hardly less humane 
than that of the Humanists themselves — who rec- 
ognised in every cry of the heart a prayer, silent or 
spoken, to the God of all the earth, of all peoples, 
and of all times. The Rome of the Antonines had 
even in this sphere no loftier ideal, no fairer vision, 
than that which now seems to float before Imperial 



RELIGION AND IMPERIALISM 59 

Britain, no wider sympathy, not merely with the 
sects of its own faith, but with the religions of other 
races within its dominions, once hostile to its own. 
By slow degrees England has arisen, first to the 
perception of the truth in other sects, and then to a 
perception of the truth in other faiths. In lesser 
creeds, and amongst decaying races, tolerance is 
sometimes the equivalent of irreligion, but the effort 
to recognize so far as possible the principle, im- 
plicit in Montesquieu, that a man is born of this re- 
ligion or of that, has, in all ages, been the stamp of 
imperial races. Upon the character of the race 
and the charg.cter of its religion, depend the answer 
to the question whether by empire the religion of the 
imperial race shall be exalted or debased. 

As in politics so in religion it is to the fifteenth 
century — the tragic insight born of defeat, disas- 
ter, and soul-anguish — that we must turn for the 
causes, for the origins of that transformation in the 
life of the nation which has resulted in the conscious 
ideal of the Britain of to-day. The " separation " 
from Rome fifty years after Bosworth had no con- 
scious imperial purpose, but it rescued the rising 
empire of England from- the taint of medisevalism 
which sapped the empires of Spain, of the Bourbons, 
and of the Hapsburgs. The Reformation in Eng- 
land owes much of its character amongst the people 
at large, apart from the government, above all in 
the heroic age of the Reformation in England — 
the Puritan wars — to that earlier convulsion in the 



6o THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

nation's consciousness, to the period of anguish and 
defeat of which we have spoken at some length al- 
ready. But for the remoter origins and causes of 
the whole movement styled " the English Refomia- 
tion " we must search not in any one period or oc- 
currence, but in the character of the race itself. 
The English Reformation does not begin with 
Henry VIII any more than the Scottish Reforma- 
tion begins with John Knox: it springs from the 
heart of the race, from the intensity, the tragic 
earnestness with which in all periods England has 
conceived the supreme questions of man's destiny, 
man's relation to the Divine, the "Whence?" and 
the " Whither? " of human life. And it is the seri- 
ousness with which England regards its own re- 
ligion, and the imaginative sympathy which gives 
it the power of recognising the sincerity of other 
religions beneath its sway, which distinguish Im- 
perial Britain from the empires of the past, 

§ 2. THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY 

In the Roman Empire, for instance, the tolerance 
of the Republic passes swiftly into the disregard of 
the Caesars of the Julian line, into the capricious or 
ineffectual persecution of later dynasties. Rome 
never endeavours in this sphere to lead its subject 
peoples to any higher vision. When that effort is 
made, Rome itself is dying. Alaric and the fifth 
century have come. For Rome the drama of a 
thousand years is ended : Rome is moribund and has 



RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY 6i 

but strength to die greatly, tragically. Would you 
see the end of Rome as in a figure darkly ? Over a 
dead Roman a Goth bends, and by the flare of a 
torch seeks to read on the still brow the secret of 
his own destiny. 

In the Empire of Persia and the great days of the 
Sassanides, in Kurush, who destroys the Median 
Empire, and spreads wider the religion of the van- 
quished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic wor- 
ship of flame, lovehest of inanimate things — even 
there no sustained, no deliberate effort towards an 
ideal amongst the peoples beneath the Persian sway 
can be discovered. Islam starts with religious as- 
pirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but 
the purity of her ideals dies with Ali. At Damas- 
cus and at Bagdad an autocratic system warped by 
contact with Rome infects the religious ; the result is 
a theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, 
at least on their political side, are abandoned, lost at 
last in the gloomy and often ferocious despotism of 
the Ottoman Turks. 

Consider in contrast with these empires the ques- 
tion — What is the distinction in this phase of hu- 
man life of the Empire of Britain, of its history? 
Steadily growing from its first beginnings — shall I 
say, from that great battle of the Winwsed, where 
three Kings are in conflict and the slayer of two lies 
dead — steadily growing, on to the present hour, as 
in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes con- 
scious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, con- 



62 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

tinuous, towards an ever purer, higher, nobler con- 
ception of man's relations to the Divine. From 
this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort 
arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire 
based on the higher justice, the imaginative justice, 
the higher freedom, the imaginative freedom. 

Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, 
during the struggle between Christianism and the 
religion of Thor and Woden, England shows far 
more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both 
sides, than is found anywhere else in Europe. 
Glance, for instance, at this struggle in Germany. 
Witikind ^^ the Saxon arises as the champion of the 
old gods against Christianity. Charlemagne with 
his Prankish cavalry comes down amongst the Sax- 
ons. His march surpasses the march of Csesar, or 
of Constantine against Rome. Witikind does rise 
to the heights of heroism against Charlemagne twice ; 
but in the end he surrenders, gives in, and dies a 
hanger-on at the court of his conqueror. Mercia, 
the kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces 
its champion of the old gods against the religion of 
Christ — Penda. There is no surrender here ; two 

1^ I have retained the familiar spelling of the Saxon hero's 
name. Giesebrecht, who discovers in the stand against Char- 
lemagne something of the spirit of Arminius, etwas voin 
Geiste Armins (D.K.I., p. 112), uses the form " Widukind," 
and the same form has the sanction of Waitz {Verfassungs- 
geschichte, iii, p. 120). Yet the form Widu-kind is probably 
no more than a chronicler's theory of the derivation of the 
name. 



RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY 63 

kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he 
rouses himself like a hoary old lion of the forest 
to fight his last battle. An intransigeant, an irre- 
concilable, this King Penda, fighting his last battle 
against this new and hated thing, this Christianism ! 
He lies dead there — he becomes no hanger-on. 
There you have the spirit of the race. It displays 
itself in a form not less impressive in the well- 
known incident in the very era of Penda, described 
by Bede. 

King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the mes- 
sage of Christ, the mansions that await the soul of 
man, the promise of a life beyond death; and Coifi, 
one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus : " So 
seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in 
winter-tide, seated with your thanes around you, 
out of the storm that rages without a sparrow flies 
into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a lit- 
tle, in the warmth and light, passes out again into 
the storm and darkness. Such is man's life, but 
whence it cometh and whither it goeth we know 
not." " We ne kunnen," as Alfred the Great, its 
first translator, ends the passage. Who does not 
see — notwithstanding the difference of time, place, 
character, and all stage circumstance — who does 
not see rise before him the judgment-hall of Soc- 
rates, hear the solemn last words to his judges : 
" I go to death, and you to life, but which of us 
goeth to the better is known to God alone — aZrjXov 

Travrl vXrjv rj tw ^ew ' ' ? 



64 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

Such is the stern and high manner in which this 
conflict in England between the rehgions of Woden 
and Christ is conducted. There in the seventh cen- 
tury is the depth of heart, the energy of soul, the 
pity and the insight which appear in other forms in 
after ages. The roll of English names in the Acta 
Sanctorum is the living witness of the sincerity, the 
intensity with which the same men who fought to 
the death for Woden at the Winwsed, or speculated 
with Coifi on the eternal mystery, accepted the faith 
which Rome taught, the ideal from Galilee trans- 
muted by Roman imagination, Roman statesman- 
ship. The Saintly Ideal lay on them like a spell : 
earth existed but to die in, life was given but to pray 
for death. Rome taught the Saxon and the Jute 
that all they had hitherto prayed for, glory in battle, 
earthly power and splendour, must be renounced, 
and become but as the sound of bells from a city 
buried deep beneath the ocean. Instead of defiance, 
Rome taught them reverence; instead of pride, self- 
abasement; instead of the worship of delight, the 
worship of sorrow. In this faith the Saxon and 
the Jute strove with tragic seriousness to live. But 
the old faith died hard, or lived on side by side with 
the new, far into the Middle Age. Literature re- 
flects the inner struggles of the period: the war- 
song of Brunanburh, the. mystic light which hangs 
upon the verses of Caedmon, the melancliQly of 
Cynewulf's lyrics. Yet what a contrast is the Eng- 
land delineated by Bede with Visigothic Spain, with 



RELIGION IN ENGLISH HISTORY 65 

Lombard Italy, or Frankish Gaul, as delineated by 
Gregory of Tours! 

Thus these Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, slowly dis- 
ciplining themselves to the new ideal — to them in 
the ninth century come the Vikings. They are not 
less conspicuous in valour, nor less prof oimdly sensi- 
tive to the wonder and mystery of life, the poets in 
other lands of the Eddas and of the Northern Myths. 
England as we know it is not yet formed. Amongst 
the formative influences of English religion and 
English freedom, and ultimately of this ideal of 
modern times, must be reckoned the Viking and the 
Norseman, the followers of Guthrum, of Ivar, of 
Hrolf, not less than the followers of Cerdic and of 
Cynric. To the religious consciousness of the Jutes, 
Angles and Saxons, the Vikings bring a religious 
consciousness as deep and serious. The struggle 
against the Danes and Normans is not a struggle of 
English against foreigners ; it is a conflict for politi- 
cal supremacy amongst men of the same race, who 
ultimately grow together into the England of the 
fourteenth century. In the light of the future, the 
struggle of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries 
does but continue the conflicts of the Heptarchic 
kings. To this land of England the Vikings have 
the right which the followers of Cerdic and Cynric 
had — the right of supremacy, the right which the 
will to possess it and the resolution to die for that 
will, confers. 



66 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

§ 3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE 
VIKINGS 

The religion of the Vikings was the converse of 
their courage. Aristotle remarks profoundly that 
the race which cannot quit itself like a man in war 
cannot do any great thing in philosophy. Religion 
is the philosophy of the warrior. And the scanty 
records of the Vikings, the character of Knut, for 
instance, or that of the Conqueror, attest the prin- 
ciple that the thoughts of the valiant about God 
penetrate more deeply than the thoughts of the das- 
tard. The Normans, who close the English Welf- 
wanderung, who close the merely formative period 
of England, illustrate this conspicuously. If the 
sombre fury of the Winwsed displays the stern 
depths of religious conviction in the vanguard of 
our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious 
earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high 
seriousness of the religious emotion of the Norse- 
man is not less clearly attested. Europe of the 
eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic 
proportions, each a Teuton in blood — Hildebrand, 
Robert Guiscard, and William the Conqueror. In 
intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand 
has few parallels in history. He is the founder of 
the Mediaeval Papacy, realising in its orders of 
monks, priests, and crusaders a State not without 
singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered. 
Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had 



RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS 67 

the power, during the execution of one gigantic de- 
sign, of producing others of not less astonishing 
vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it 
fail. One of his designs originated in the impres- 
sion which Norman genius made upon him. It was 
to transform this race, the tyrants of the Baltic and 
the English seas, the dominators of the Mediter- 
ranean and the Aegean, into omnipresent emissaries 
and soldiers of the theocratic State whose centre was 
Rome. But the vastness of his original design 
broke even the mighty will of Hildebrand ; his pur- 
pose with regard to the Norseman remains like 
some abandoned sketch by Buonarroti or Tintoretto. 
Yet no ruler of men had a pro founder knowledge of 
character, and with the Viking nature circumstance 
had rendered him peculiarly familiar. The judg- 
ment of Orderic and of William of Malmesbury 
confirms the impression of Hildebrand. But the 
Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathe- 
drals which they raised from the Seine to the Tyne 
are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly muse, fit 
emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring 
valour of our race. 

There is a way of writing the history of Senlac 
which Voltaire, Thierry, Michelet, and Guizot dote 
upon, infecting certain English historians with their 
complacency, as if the Norse Vikings were the de- 
scendants of Chlodovech, and the conquest of Eng- 
land were the glory of France. The absurdity was 
crowned in 1804, when Napoleon turned the atten- 



68 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

tion of his subjects to the history of 1066, as an 
auspicious study for the partners of his great enter- 
prise against the England of Pitt! How many 
Franks, one asks, followed the red banner of the 
Bastard to Senlac, or, leaning on their shields, 
watched the coronation at Westminster? Nor was 
it in the valley of the Seine that the Norsemen ac- 
quired their genius for religion, for government, for 
art. To the followers of Hrolf the empire of 
Charlemagne had the halo which the Empire of 
Rome had to the followers of Alaric, and in that 
spirit they adopted its language and turned its laws 
to their own purposes. But Jutes and Angles and 
Saxons, Ostmen and Danes, were, if less assiduous, 
not less earnest pupils in the same school as the 
Norsemen: to all alike, the remnant of the Frank- 
ish realm of Charles lay nearest, representing Rome 
and the glory of the Caesars. Nature and her affin- 
ities drew the Normans to the West, across the salt 
plains whither for six hundred years the most ad- 
venturous of their own blood had preceded them. 
They closed the movement towards the sunset which 
Jute and Saxon began ; they are the last, the young- 
est, and in politics the most richly gifted; yet in 
other departments of human activity not more 
richly gifted than their kindred who produced Cyne- 
wulf and Csedmon, Aidan and Bede, Coifi and 
Dunstan. And who shall affirm from what branch 
of the stock the architects of the sky-searching ca- 
thedrals sprang? 



RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS 69 

Senlac is thus in the hne of Heptarchic battles; it 
is the last struggle for the political supremacy over 
all England amongst those various sections of the 
Northern races who in the way of six hundred years 
make England, and who in their religious and politi- 
cal character lay the unseen foundations of Imperial 
Britain. 

Two traits of the Norman character impress the 
greatest of their contemporary historians, William 
of Malmesbury — the Norman love of battle and the 
Norman love of God. Upon these two ideas the 
history of the Middle Age turns. The crusader, the 
monk, the troubadour, the priest, the mystic, the 
dreamer and the saint, the wandering scholar and 
the scholastic philosopher, all derive thence. Chiv- 
alry is bom. The knight beholds in his lady's face 
on earth the image of Our Lady in Heaven, the 
Virgin-Mother of the Redeemer of men. From the 
grave of his dead mistress Ramon Lull withdraws to 
a hermit's cell to ponder the beauty that is imperish- 
able; and over the grave of Beatrice, Dante rears a 
shrine, a temple more awful, more sublime than any 
which even that age has carved in stone. 

Into this theatre of tossing life, the nation which 
the followers of Cerdic and Knut and of William 
the Conqueror have formed enters greatly. In 
thought, in action, in art, something of the mighty 
role which the future centuries reserve for her is 
portended. The immortal energy, the love of war, 
the deep religious fervour of England find in the 



70 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

Crusades, as by God's own assignment, the task of 
her heart's desire. We have but to turn to the 
churches of England, to study the Templars carved 
upon their sepulchres, to know that in that great 
tournament of the world the part of the Franks, if 
the noisier and more continuous, was not more 
earnest. How singular is the chance, if it be chance, 
which confronts the followers of the new faith with 
a Penda, and the followers of the crescent with a 
Richard Lion-heart! Upon the shifting Arabic im- 
agination he alone of the infidels exercises enduring 
sway. The hero of Tasso has no place in Arab 
history, but the memory of Richard is there imper- 
ishably. Richard's services to England are not the 
theme of common praise, yet, if we estimate the 
greatness of a king by another standard than roods 
of conquered earth, or roods of parchment black- 
ened with unregarded statutes, Richard I, crusader 
and poet, must be reckoned amongst the greatest of 
his great line, and his name to the Europe of the 
Middle Age was like the blast of a trumpet announc- 
ing the England of the years to come. 

§ 4. WORLD-HISTORIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE 
ENGLISH REFORMATION 

The crusader of the twelfth century follows the 
saint of an earlier age, and in the thirteenth, Eng- 
land, made one in political and constitutional ideals, 
attains a source of profounder religious unity. The 
consciousness that not to Rome, but to Galilee itself 



THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 71 

she may turn for the way, the truth, the light, has 
arisen. In the steady development, in the ever- 
deepening power of this consciousness, lies the un- 
written history of the English Reformation. The 
race resolves no more to trust to other witness, but 
with its own eyes to look upon the truth. 

Political history has its effect upon the growth of 
this conviction. In the fourteenth century, for in- 
stance, the Papacy is at Avignon. Edward I in the 
beginning of that century withstands Boniface 
VIII, the last great pontiff in whom the temper and 
resolution of Hildebrand appear, as William the 
Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII. The stat- 
ute of praemunire, a generation later, prepares the 
way for Wyclif. The Papacy is now but an ap- 
panage of the Valois monarchs. How shall Eng- 
land, conqueror of those monarchs at Crecy and on 
other fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a 
defeated antagonist? 

The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, 
rooted in the blood of our race, which manifest 
themselves in the early and Middle Ages, determine 
the character of the religious history of the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fifteenth 
century, suffering and the presence of suffering, the 
law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add their 
transforming power to spiritual life. As in politi- 
cal life the sympathy with the wrongs of others 
grows into imaginative justice, so sympathy with 
the faiths of others, which springs from the con- 



72 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

sciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow 
for a vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the 
creeds and religions of others. For only a race 
deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive to the 
faith that is in others, can understand the religion 
of others; only such a race can found an empire 
characterised at once by freedom and by faith. 

The very ardour of the belief of the race in the 
ideal from Rome — a Semitic ideal, transmuted by 
Roman genius and policy — swept the Teutonic im- 
agination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where 
Rome herself had sought them. This is the im- 
pulse which binds the whole English Reformation, 
the whole movement of English religious thought 
from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Words- 
worth and Carlyle. It is this common impulse of 
the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and because 
he is in this their leader the English people forgets 
his absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges. 
The character of the English Reformation after the 
first tumultuous conflicts, the fierce essays of royal 
theocracy and Jesuit reactionism, set steadily to- 
wards Liberty of Conscience. 

This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true 
heroic age of the Reformation. It appears, for ex- 
ample, in Oliver Cromwell himself. Cromwell is 
one of the disputed figures in our history, and every 
English historian has drawn his own Cromwell. 
But to foreign historians w.e may look for a judg- 
ment less partial, less personal. Dr. Dollinger, for 



THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 73 

instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and pro- 
found study of history have given the right, which 
can only be acquired by vigil and fasting, to speak 
about the characters of the past — he who by his po- 
sition as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes 
Cromwell as the "prophet of Liberty of Con- 
science." ^^ This is the deliberate judgment of 
Dollinger. It was the judgment of the peasants of 
the Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago! 
Somewhat the same impression was made by Crom- 
well upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot. 

Again in the seventeenth century, in the Irene of 
Drummond, and in the remarkable work of Barclay, 

17 DoUinger's characterisation of Cromwell is remarkable — 
"Aber er (i.e., Cromwell) hat, zuerst unter den Machtigen, 
ein religioses Princip aufgestellt und, soweit sein Arm reichte, 
zur Geltung gebracht, welches, im Gegensatz gegen die gros- 
sen historischen Kirchen und gegen den Islam, Keim und 
Stoff zu einer abgesonderten Religion in sich trug : — das 
Princip der Gewissensfreiheit, der Verwerfung alles relig- 
iosen Zwanges." Proceeding to expand this idea, Dollinger 
again describesi Cromwell as the annunciator of the doctrine 
of the inviolability of conscience, so vast in its significance to 
the modern world, and adds : " Es war damals von weittra- 
gender Bedeutung, dass der Beherrscher eines machtigen 
Reiches diese neue Lehre verkiindete, die dann noch fast an- 
derthalb Jahrhunderte brauchte, bis sie in der ofifentlichen 
Meinung so erstarkte, dass auch ihre noch immer zahlreichen 
Gegner sich vor ihr beugen miissen. Die Evangelische Union, 
welche jetzt zwei Welttheile umfasst und ein friiher unbe- 
kanntes und fur unmoglich gehaltenes Princip der Einigung 
verschiedener Kirchen gliicklich verwirklicht hat, darf wohl 
Cromwell als ihren Propheten und vorbereitenden Griinder 
betrachten." — Akademische Vortr'dge, 1891, vol. iii, pp. 55, 56. 



74 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

the Argenis/^ in its whole conception of the rehgious 
Hfe, of monasticism, as in its ideaHsation of the 
character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the 
same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion 
than in politics. We encounter it later in Shaftes- 
bury and in Locke. It is the essential thought of 
the work of Thomas Hobbes. It is supremely and 
beautifully expressed in Algernon Sidney, the mar- 
tyr of constitutional freedom and of tolerance. 

And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney? One 
who knew him well, though opposed to his party, 
said of him, " He regards Christianity as a kind of 
divine philosophy of the mind." Community of 
religious not less than of political aims binds closer 
the friendship of Locke and Shaftesbury. In the 
preparation of a constitution for the Carolinas they 
found the opportunity which Corsica offered to 
Rousseau. In the Letters on Toleration ^^ Locke did 

18 The Argenis was published in 1621 ; but amongst the ideas 
on rehgion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which 
throng its pages, we find curious anticipations of the position 
of Locke and even of Hume, just as in politics, in the re- 
marks on elective monarchy put in the lips of the Cardinal 
Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice and law, Barclay 
reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to Alger- 
non Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria. 
In the motion of the stars Barclay sees the proof of the exist- 
ence of God, and requires no other. The Argenis, unfortu- 
nately for English literature, was written at a time when 
men still wavered between the vernacular and Latin as a 
medium of expression. 

19 The spirit and tendency of Locke's work appear in the 
short preface to the English version of the Latin Epistola de 



THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 75 

but expand the principles upon which, with Shaftes- 
bury's aid, he elaborated the government of the 
new State. The Record Office has no more precious 
document than the draught of that work, the mar- 
gins covered with corrections in the handwriting of 
these two men, the one the greatest of the Restora- 
tion statesmen, the other ranking amongst the great- 
est speculative thinkers of his own or any age. One 
suggested formula after another is traceable there, 
till at length the decision is made, that from the 
citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not ad- 
herence to this creed or to that, but simply the decla- 
ration, " There is a God." Algernon Sidney aids 
Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, 
and their joint work is informed by the same 
spirit as the " Constitutions "of Locke and Shaftes- 
bury. 

Tolerantia, which had already met with a general approba- 
tion in France and Holland (1689). "This narrowness of 
spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the principal occasion 
of our miseries and confusions. But whatever has been the 
occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure. 
We have need of more generous remedies than what have 
yet been made use of in our distemper. It is neither declara- 
tions of indulgence, nor acts of comprehension, such as have 
yet been practised, or projected amongst us, that can do the 
work. The first will but palliate,, the second increase our evil. 
Ab&olute Liberty, just and true Liberty, equal and impartial 
Liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of." The second 
Letter, styled " A Second Letter concerning Toleration," is 
dated May 27th, 1690 — the year of the publication of his 
Essay o-n the Human Understanding ; the third, the longest, 
and in some respects the most eloquent, " A Third Letter for 
Toleration," bears the date June 20th, 1692. 



7(i THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth cen- 
tury occupy a position analogous to their position 
in politics, already delineated. In politics, as we 
have seen, they establish a constitutional govern- 
ment, and make sure the path to the wider freedom 
of the future. In religion they fix the principles of 
that philosophic tolerance which the later centuries 
develop and apply. Both in politics and in religion 
they turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of 
Bourbon and Hapsburg, consciously or uncon- 
sciously preparing the foundations of the Imperial- 
ism of to-day. 

If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met 
and talked under the roof of the young Lord Falk- 
land at Tew represent in their religious and civil 
perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, 
within the intersecting circles of Pope and Boling- 
broke, Swift and Addison, may be found in one 
form or another all the A^aried impulses of the eight- 
eenth — intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or 
religious. England had succeeded to the place 
which Holland filled in the days of Descartes and 
Spinoza — the refuge of the oppressed, the home of 
political and religious freedom, the study of Mon- 
tesquieu, the asylum of Voltaire.-'^ Yet between 

-0 Voltaire ridiculed certain peculiarities of Shakespeare 
when mediocre French writers and critics began to find in 
his " barbarities " an excuse for irreverence at the expense 
of Racine, but he never tires of reiterating his admiration for 
the country of Locke and Hume, of Bolingbroke and Newton. 
A hundred phrases could be gathered from his correspond- 



THE ENGLISH REFORMATION ^7 

the England of the eighteenth and the England of 
the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf 
fixed as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity 
imagined. The one is the organic inevitable growth 
of the other. The England which fought at Blen- 
heim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as 
fought at Marston Moor and Dunbar. Chatham res- 
cued it from a deeper abasement than that into which 
it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier parliaments, 
and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Crom- 
well. Nor is the religious character of the century 
less profound, less earnestly reverent, when rightly 
studied. Even its scepticism, its fiery denials, or 
vehement inquiry — a Woolston's, for instance, or a 
Cudworth's, like a Shelley's or a James Thomson's ^^ 

ence extending over half a century, in which this finds serious 
or extravagant utterance. Even in the last decades of his 
life, when he sees the France of the future arising, he writes 
to Madame Du Deffand : " How trivial we are compared with 
the Greeks, the Romans, and the English " ; and to Helvetius, 
about the same period (1765), he admits the profound debts 
which France and Europe owe to the adventurous thought of 
England. He even forces Frederick the Great into reluctant 
but definite acquiescence with his enthusiasm — " Yes, you are 
right ; you French have grace, the English have the depth, and 
we Germans, we have caution." 

21 James Thomson, who distinguished himself from the au- 
thor of the Seasons, and defined his own literary aims by the 
initials B. V., i.e., Bysshe Vonalis (Novalis), though possess- 
ing neither the wide scholarship nor the depth of thought of 
Leopardi, occasionally equals the great Italian in felicity of 
phrase and in the poignant expression of the world-sorrow. 
Several of the more violent pamphlets on religious themes 



78 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

long afterwards — spring from no love of darkness, 
but from the immortal ardour for the light, for 
Truth, even if there come with it silence and utter 
death. And from this same ardour arises that ex- 
traordinary outburst of varied intellectual and re- 
ligious effort, critical or constructive, which makes 
the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras compara- 
ble in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, 
to the great period of the Aiifkldrung in Germany. 
Kant acknowledged his indebtedness to Hume. 
Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are in 
philosophic theory but pupils of Locke. 

Towards the close of the century appeared Gib- 
bon's great work, the Decline and Fall, a prose epic 
in seventy-one books, upon the last victories, the last 
triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles of 
the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner 
decay, the ever-renewed assaults of foreign violence, 
the Goth, the Saracen, the Mongol, and at the close, 
the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell to the 
Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Otto- 
mans in the palaces of the C^sars, and the melan- 
choly musings of an Italian scholar over the ruins 
on the Seven Hills. An epic in prose — and ever}' 
one of its books might be compared to the gem-en- 
crusted hilt of a sword, and each wonderfully 
wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point of the 
sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere 

ascribed to him are of doubtful authenticity. He died in 1882, 
the year after the death of Carlyle. 



THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 79 

turned against superstition, bigotry, and religious 
wrong. 

David Hume's philosophy was more read ^^ in 

22 Hume's disappointment at the reception accorded to the 
first quarto of his History of England must be measured by 
the standard of the hopes he had formed. Conscious of 
genius, and not without ambition, he had reached middle life 
nameless, and save in a narrow circle unacknowledged. But 
the appearance of his History, two years later than his Politi- 
cal Discourses, was synchronous with the darkest hours in 
English annals since 1667. An EngHsh fleet had to quit the 
Channel before the combined navies of France and Spain ; 
Braddock was defeated at Fort Duquesne; Minorca was lost. 
At this period the tide of ill-feeling between the Scotch and 
the English ran bitter and high. The taunts of individuals 
were but the explosions of a resentment deep-seated and 
strong. London had not yet forgotten the panic which the 
march of the Pretender had roused. To the Scottish nation 
the massacre at CuUoden seemed an act of revenge — savage, 
premeditated, and impolitic. The ministry of Chatham 
changed all this. He raised an army from the clans who ten 
years before had marched to the heart of England; ended the 
privileges of the coterie of Whig families, bestowing the posts 
of danger and power not upon the fearless but frequently 
incapable sons of the great houses, but upon the talent bred 
in the ranks of English merchants. Hume's work was thus 
caught in the stream of Chatham's victories, and a ray from 
the glory of the nation was reflected upon its historian. The 
general verdict was ratified by the concord of the best judg- 
ments. Gibbon despaired of rivalling its faultless lucidity; 
Burke turned from a projected History to write in Hume's 
manner the events of the passing years, founding the Annual 
Register. Its outspoken Toryism was welcome to a genera- 
tion weary of the "Venetian oligarchy," this epoch, if any, 
meriting Beaconsfield's epithet. The work had the fortune 
which Gibbon and Montesquieu craved for their own — it was 
read in the boudoir as much as in the study. Nor did its 



8o THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

France than in Scotland or England, but Hume 
wrote one book here widely read, his History of 
England. It has been superseded, but it did what 
it aimed at doing. There are certain books which, 
when they have done their work, are forgotten, the 
Dialectiquc of Ramus, for instance. This is not to 
be regretted. Hume's History of England is one of 
these books. For nearly four generations it was 
the only history of England that English men and 
women read. It was impossible that a man like 
Hume, the central principle of whose life was the 
same as that of Locke, Shaftesbuiy, Gibbon — the 
desire for a larger freedom for man's thought — it 
was impossible for him to write without saturating 
every page with that purpose, and it was impossible 
that three generations could read that History with- 
out being insensibly, unconsciously transformed, 
their aspirations elevated, their judgments moulded 
by contact with such a mind as that of Hume. 

Recently the work of the great intellects of these 
two centuries bears fruit in our changed attitude 
towards Ireland, in the emancipation of the Catho- 
lics there; in our changed attitude towards the 
Jews, towards the peoples of India, towards Islam. 
Edward Gibbon and Hume laid the foundation of 

power diminish. It contained the best writing, the deepest 
thought, the most vivid portraiture, devoted to men and 
things English, over a continuous period, until the works of 
Carlyle and Macaulay. 



THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 8i 

that college which is rising at Khartoum for the 
teaching of Mohammedanism under the Queen. It 
was not only Lord Kitchener who built it; John 
Locke, John Milton, built it. 

The saint, the crusader, the monk, reformer, 
puritan, and nonjuror lead in unbroken succession 
to the critic, the speculative thinker, the analytic 
or synthetic philosopher of the eighteenth and the 
nineteenth century, these representing Imperial 
Britain, as the former represent national or feudal 
England. Erigena in the ninth century surveying 
all things as from a tall rock, Dunstan, Roger Bacon 
wasting in a prison " through the incurable stupidity 
of the world," as he briefly explains it, Michael 
Scott, Hooker, Bacon, Glanvil, Milton, and Locke, 
formed by England, these men have in turn guided 
or informed the highest aspirations, the very heart 
of the race. The greatest empire in the annals of 
mankind is at once the most earnestly religious and 
the most tolerant. Her power is deep-based as the 
foundations of the rocks, her glance wide as the 
boundaries of the world, far-searching as the seons 
of time. 

Yet it is not only from within, but from without, 
that this transformation in the spirit of England 
has been effected; not only from within by the 
work of a Sidney, a Gibbon, but from without by 
the influence, imperceptible yet sure, of the faiths 
and creeds of the Oriental peoples she conquers. 



82 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

The work of the Arabists of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, such men as the Pocockes,^^ 
father and son, Ockley and Sale, supplements or 
expands the teaching of Locke and of Hume. The 
industry of Ross, the enthusiastic studies of Sir 
William Jones, brought the power of Persian and 
Indian thought to bear upon the English mind, and 
the efforts of all these men seem to converge in one 
of the greatest literary monuments of the present 
century — The Sacred Books of the East. 

Thus then we have seen this immortal " energy 
of the soul " in religion and thought, as in politics, 
manifest itself in like aspirations towards imagina- 
tive freedom, the higher freedom and the higher 
justice, summed in the phrase " Elargissez Dieti" 
that man's soul, dowered with the unfettered use 
of all its faculties, may set towards the lodestar of 
its being, harmony with the Divine, whether it be 
through freedom in religious life or in political life 
or in any other form of life. For all life, all being, 
is organic, ceaselessly transformed, ceaselessly trans- 
forming, ceaseless action and interaction, like that 
vision of Goethe's of the golden chalices ascending 
and descending perpetually between heaven and this 
dark earth of ours. 

2s The significance of these men's work may be estimated by 
the ignorance even of scholars and tolerant thinkers. Spi- 
noza, for instance, in 1675, describes Islam as a faith that has 
known no schism ; and twenty years earlier Pascal brands 
Mohammed as forbidding all study! 



TESTIMONY OF THE PAST 83 

§ 5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE PAST: A FINAL 
CONSIDERATION 

Before leaving this part of our subject, the testi- 
mony of the past, there is one more question to con- 
sider, though with brevity. The great empires or 
imperial races of the past, Hellas, Rome, Egypt, 
Persia, Islam, represent each a distinct ideal — in 
each a separate aspect of the human soul, as the 
characterising attribute of the race, seems incar- 
nate. In Hellas, for example, it is Beauty, to Ka\6v ; 
in Rome, it is Power ; in Egypt, Mystery, as embod- 
ied in her temples, half -underground, or in the 
Sphinx that guards the sepulchres of her kings; 
whilst in Persia, Beauty and Aspiration seem to 
unite in that mystic curiosity which is the feature 
at once of her religion, her architecture, her laws, 
of Magian ritual and Gnostic theurgy. Other races 
possess these qualities, love of beauty, the sense of 
mystery; but in Hellas and in Egypt they differen- 
tiate the race and all the sections of the race. 

What characteristic, then, common to the whole 
Teutonic race, does this Empire of Britain repre- 
sent? Apart altogether from its individual ideal, 
political or religious, what attribute of the race, dis- 
tinguishing it from other races, the Hellenic, the 
Roman, the Persian, does it eminently possess? 

Compare, first of all, the beginnings of the people 
of England with the beginnings of the Hellenic peo- 
ple, or better, perhaps, with the beginnings of Rome. 



84 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

Who founded the Roman State ? There is one fact 
about which the most recent authorities agree with 
the most ancient, that Rome was founded much as 
Athens was founded, by desperate men from every 
city, district, region, in Italy. The outlaw, the 
refugee from justice or from private vengeance, the 
landless man and the homeless man — these gath- 
ered in the " Broad Plain," or migrated together to 
the Seven Hills, and by the very extent of the walls 
which they traced marked the plan which the Rome 
of the Caesars filled in. This process may have ex- 
tended over a century — over two centuries ; Rome 
drawing to itself ever new bands of adventurers, 
desperate in valour and in fortune as the first. Who 
are the founders of England, of Imperial Britain? 
They are those " co-seekers," conqiicestores, I have 
spoken of, who came with Cerdic and with Cynric, 
the chosen men, that is to say, the most adventurous, 
most daring, most reckless — the fittest men of the 
whole Teutonic kindred ; and not for two- centuries 
merely, but for six centuries, this *' land of the 
Angles," stretching from the Forth and Clyde to the 
Channel, from Eadwine's Burgh to Andredeswald, 
draws to itself, and is gradually ever peopled closer 
and closer with. Vikings and Danes, Norsemen and 
Ostmen, followers of Guthrum, and followers of 
Hrolf, followers of Ivar and followers of William 
I. They come in "hundreds," they come in thou- 
sands. Into England, as into some vast crucible, 
the valour of the earth pours itself for six hundred 



TESTIMONY OF THE PAST 85 

years, till, molten and fused together, it arises at 
last one and undivided, the English Nation, Such 
was the foundation, such the building of the Em- 
pire, and these are the title-deeds which even in its 
first beginnings this land can show. 

And of the inner race character as representative 
of the whole Teutonic kindred, the testimony is not 
less sure. What a heaven of light falls upon the 
Hellas of the Isles, that period of its history which 
does not begin, but ends with the Iliad and with the 
Odyssey — works that sum up an old civilisation ! 
Already is born that beauty which, whether in reli- 
gion, or in art, or in life, Hellas made its own for- 
ever. And it is not difficult to trace back the de- 
scent of the ideal of Virgil and of Cicero to the 
shepherds and outlaws of the Seven Hills. The in- 
finite curiosity of Persia, the worshipper of flame, 
is anticipated on its earliest monuments, and the 
mystery of Egypt is coeval with its first appearance 
in history. But of England and the Teutonic race 
what shall one say? A characteristic universal in 
Teutonic history is the extent to which the specu- 
lative or metaphysical pervades the practical, the 
political, and social conditions of life. Freedom 
and deathless courage are its inheritance; but these 
throughout its history are accompanied by certain 
vaguer tendencies of thought and aspiration, the 
touch of things unseen, those impulses beyond the 
finite towards the Infinite, which display themselves 
so conspicuously in later ages. In the united power 



86 THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

of these two worlds, the visible and the invisible, 
upon the Teutonic imagination, in this alternate 
sway of Reality and Illusion, must be sought the 
characteristic of this race. In the Faust legend, 
which, in one form or another, the race has made 
its own, it attains a supreme embodiment. In the 
Oriental imagination the sense of the transiency of 
life passes swiftly into a disdain for life itself, and 
displays itself in a courage which arises less from 
hope than from apathy or despair. But the death- 
defiant courage of the Viking springs from no dis- 
dain of life, but from the scorn of death, hazard- 
ing life rather than the hope upon which his life 
is set. 

This characteristic can be traced throughout the 
range of Teutonic art and Teutonic literature, and 
even in action. The spirit which originates the 
Volker-zvandening, for instance, reappears in the 
half -unconscious impulses, the instinctive bent of 
the race, which lead the brave of Europe generation 
by generation for two hundred years to the cru- 
sades. They found the grave empty, but the crav- 
ing of the heart was stayed, the yearning towards 
Asgard, the sun-bright eastern land, where were 
Balder and the Anses, and the rivers and meadows 
unfading, whence ages ago their race had journeyed 
to the forest-gloom and mists by the Danube and 
the Rhine, by the Elbe and the Thames. 

Thus, then, as Beauty is impersonated in Hellas, 
Mystery in Egypt, so this attribute which we may 



TESTIMONY OF THE PAST 87 

name Reverie is impersonated in the Teutonic race. 

And in the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teu- 
tonic kindred, this attribute, this Reverie, the di- 
vided sway of the actual and of the dream-world, 
attests its presence and its power from the earliest 
epochs. It has left its impress, its melancholy, its 
restlessness, its infinite regret, upon the verse of 
Cynewulf and C^dmon, whilst in the devotion of 
the saint, the scholar, the hermit, and of much of 
the common life of the time to the ideal of Calvary, 
its presence falls like a mystic light upon the turbu- 
lence and battle- fury of the eighth and ninth cen- 
turies. It adds the glamour as from a distant and 
enchanted past to chivalrous romance and to the 
crusader's and the pilgrim's high endeavour. It 
cast its spell upon the Tudor mariners and made 
the ocean their inheritance. In later times it re- 
appears as the world-impulse which has made our 
race a native of every climate, yet jealous of its tra- 
ditions, proud of its birth, unsubdued by its en- 
vironment. 

If in the circuit they marked out for the walls of 
early Rome its first founders seemed to anticipate 
the eternal city, so on the high seas the founders of 
England, Jute, Viking, and Norseman seem to fore^ 
shadow the Empire of the World, and by the surge 
or in the forest solitude, already to meditate the 
terror, the sorrow, and the mystery, and the coming 
harmonies, of Faustus and Lear, of Hamlet and 
Adonais. 



PART II 
THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 



CHAPTER IV 

THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with 
the slow growth across the centuries of those po- 
htical or rehgious ideals which now control the des- 
tinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever 
higher conception of man's relations towards the 
Divine, towards other men, and towards the State. 
To-day a subject of more pressing interest confronts 
us, but a subject more involved also in the preju- 
dices and sympathies which the violence of pity or 
anger, surprise or alarm, arouses, woven more 
closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears which 
compose the instant of man's life. We are in the 
thick of the deed — how are we to judge it? How 
conjure the phantoms inimical to truth, which Taci- 
tus found besetting his path as he prepared to nar- 
rate the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty 
years after the event? 

Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and ac- 
cessible, and to this aspect I propose to direct your 
attention. The separate incidents of the war, and 
the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers, poli- 
ticians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, 

91 



92 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

the wisdom or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, 
the wavering or the resolution, ancient experience 
grown half prophetic with the years, alert vigour, 
quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or in- 
genuous surprise tardily awaking from the dream 
of a world which is not this — all these will fall 
within the domain of History some centuries hence 
when what men saw has been sifted from what they 
merely desired to see or imagined they saw. 

But the place of the war in the general life of this 
State, and the purely psychological question, how 
is the idea of this war, in Plato's sense of that word, 
related to the idea of Imperial Britain? — these it is 
possible even now to consider, sine ira et studio. 
What is its historical significance compared with 
the wars of the past, what is the presage of this great 
war — if it be a great war — for the future? 

§ I. THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR 
IN SOUTH AFRICA 

Now the magnitude of a war does not depend 
upon the numbers, relative or absolute, of the op- 
posing forces. Fewer men fell at Salamis than at 
Towton, and in the battle of Bedr ^^ the total force 

24 The battle of Bedr was fought in the second year of the 
Hegira, a. d. 624, in a valley near the Red Sea, between 
Mecca and Medina. The victory sealed the faith not only of 
his followers but of Mohammed himself in his divine mission. 
Mohammed refers to this triumph in surah after surah of the 
Koran, as Napoleon lingers over the memory of Areola, of 
Lodi, or Toulon. 



ITS HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE 93 

engaged did not exceed two thousand, yet Moham- 
med's victory changed the history of the world. 
The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a hand- 
ful compared with the army which marched with de 
Saxe to Tournay, but the achievement of the Tyro- 
lese is enduring as Fontenoy. War is the supreme 
act in the life of a State, and it is the motives which 
impel, the ideal which is pursued, that determine 
the greatness or insignificance of that act. It is the 
cause, the principles in collision which make it for- 
ever glorious, or swiftly forgotten. What, then, 
are the principles at issue in the present war? 

The war in South Africa, as we saw in the open- 
ing chapter, is the first event or series of events upon 
a great scale, the genesis of which lies in this force 
named Imperialism. It is the first conspicuous ex- 
pression of this ideal in the world of action — of 
heroic action, which now as always implies heroic 
suffering. No other war in our history is in its 
origins and its aims so evidently the realisation, so 
exclusively the result of this imperial ideal. What- 
ever may have been the passing designs of the Gov- 
ernment, lofty or trivial, whatever the motives of 
individual politicians, this is the cause and this the 
ideal by which, consciously or unconsciously, the de- 
cision of the State has been prescribed and con- 
trolled. But the present war is not merely a war 
for an idea, which of itself would be enough to 
make the war, in M. Thiers' refrain, digne de I'at- 
tention des hommes; but, like the wars of the six- 



94 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

teenth century or the Frencli Revolutionary Wars, 
it is a war between two ideals, between two princi- 
ples that strike deep into the life-history of modern 
States. 

In the religious wars of the sixteenth century the 
principle of freedom was arrayed against the prin- 
ciple of authority. The conflict rolled hither and 
thither for two centuries, and was illustrated by 
the valour and genius of Europe, by cliaracters and 
incidents of imposing grandeur, sublime devotion, 
or moving pity. So in the war of the French Revo- 
lution the dying principle of IMonarchism was ar- 
rayed against the principle of Democracy, and the 
tragic heroism with which the combatants repre- 
sented these principles, whether Austria, Russia, 
Spain, England, Germany, or France, makes that 
war one of the most precious memories of mankind. 

In the tragedies of art, in stage-drama, the con- 
flict, the struggle is between two principles, two 
forces, one base, the other exalted. But in the 
world-drama a conflict of a pro founder kind reveals 
itself, the conflict between heroism and heroism, be- 
tween ideal and ideal, often equally lofty, equally 
impressive. 

Such is the eternal contrast between the tragic in 
Art and the tragic in History, and this character- 
istic of these two great conflicts of the sixteenth and 
the eighteenth centuries reappears in the present 
war. There also two principles equally lofty and 
impressive are at strife — the dying principle of Na- 



NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM 95 

tionality, and the principle which, for weal or woe, 
is that of the future, the principle of Imperialism. 
These are the forces contending against each other 
on the sterile veldt ; this is the first act of the drama 
whose denouement — who dare foretell ? What 
distant generation shall behold that curtain? 

§ 2. NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM 

In political life, in the life-history of states, as 
in religious, as in intellectual and social history, 
change and growth, or what we now name Evolu- 
tion, are perpetual, continuous, unresting. The em- 
pire which has ceased to advance has begun to re- 
cede. Motion is the law of its being, if not towards 
a fuller life, motion toward death. Thus in a race 
dowered with the genius for empire, as Rome was, 
as Britain is, Imperialism is the supreme, the crown- 
ing form, which in this process of evolution it at- 
tains. The civic, the feudal, or the oligarchic State 
passes into the national, the national into the im- 
perial, by slow or swift gradations, but irresistibly, 
as by a fixed law of nature. No great statesman 
is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age. The 
patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest 
form, to the actualised ideal of his time. Eliot in 
the seventeenth century died for the constitutional 
rights of a nation ; in the thirteenth he would have 
stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the 
nineteenth he would have added his great name to 
imperialism. 



96 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

The national is thus but a phase in the onward 
movement of an imperial State, of a race destined 
to empire. In such a State, Nationality has no pe- 
culiar sanctity, no fixed, immutable influence, no 
absolute sway. The term National, indeed, has re- 
cently acquired in politics and in literature some- 
thing of the halo which in the beginning of the 
century belonged to the idea of liberty alone. The 
part which it has played in Bohemia and Hungary, 
Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and, 
above all, in the unity of Italy and the realisation 
after four centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a 
living witness of its power. In the Middle Age 
the two ideas, nationality and independence, were 
inseparable, but with the completion of the State 
system of Europe, the rise of Prussia and the trans- 
formation of the half-oriental Muscovy into the 
Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in Euro- 
pean politics of the Balance-of- Power -^ theory, a 

25 Gentz' work on the Balance of Power, Fragmente aus der 
neuesten Geschichte des politischen Gleichgezvichtes in Europa, 
Dresden, 1806, is still, not only from its environment, but 
from its conviction, the classic on this subject. It gained him 
the friendship of Metternich, and henceforth he became the 
constant and often reckless and violent exponent of Austrian 
principles. But he was sincere. To the charge of being the 
Aretino of the Holy Alliance, Gentz could retort with Mira- 
beau that he was paid, not bought. The friendship of Rahel 
and Varnhagen von Ense acquits him of suspicion. Nor is 
his undying hostility to the Revolution more surprising than 
that of Burke, whom he translated, or of Rivarol, whose 
elusive but studied grace of style he not unsuccessfully imi- 



NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM 97 

disruption occurred between these ideas, and a 
series of protected nationalities arose. 

Indeed, as we recede from the event, the Revo- 
lution of 1848 presents itself ever more definitely 
as it appeared to certain of its actors, and to a few 
of the more speculative onlookers, as but an after- 
math of 1789 and 1793, as the net return, the prac- 
tical result to France and to Europe of the glorious 
sacrifices and hopes of the revolutionary era. Na- 
tionality was the occasion and the excuse of 1848; 
but the ideal was a shadow from the past. The 
men of that time do not differ more widely from 
the men of 1789 than Somers and Halifax differ 
from the great figures of the earlier revolution, 
Pym, Strafford, and Cromwell.^® The amazing 

tated. Gentz, who was in his twelfth year at Bunker's Hill, 
in his twenty-sixth when the Bastille fell, hved just long 
enough to see the Revolution of 1830 and the flight of Charles 
X. But the shock of the Revolution of July seemed but a 
test of the strength of the fabric which he had aided Metter- 
nich to rear. So that as life closed Gentz could look around 
on a completed task. Napoleon slept at St. Helena; his child, 
le fits de I'homme, was in a seclusion that would shortly end 
in the grave ; Canning was dead, and Byron ; Heine was in 
exile, Chateaubriand, a peer; quotusquisque reliquus qui rem- 
publicam vidisset? who was there any longer to remember 
Marengo and Austerlitz, Wagram, and Schonbrunn? And yet 
exactly seven months and nineteen days after Gentz breathed 
his last, the first reformed parliament met at Westminster, 
January 29th, 1833, announcing the advent to power of a 
democracy even mightier than that of 1789. 

26 It is hardly necessary to indicate that allusions to the 
" glorious but bloodless " revolution of 1688 are unwarranted 
and pointless when designed to tarnish, by the contrast they 



98 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

confusion which attends the efforts of French and 
German pubHcists to expand the concept of the Na- 
tion supports the evidence of history that the great 
role which it has played is transient and accidental, 
and that it is not the final and definite form towards 
which the life of a State moves. It is one thing 
to exalt the grandeur of this ideal for Italy or for 
France, but it is another to assume that it has final 
and equal grandeur in every land and to every State. 
Nor are the endeavours of such writers as Man- 
cini or Bluntschli to trace the principle of National- 
ity to the deepest impulses of man's life more 
auspicious. Not to Humanity, but to Imperial 
Rome, must be ascribed the origin of nationality as 
the prevailing form in the State system of modern 
Europe. For Roman policy was, so to speak, a 
Destiny, not merely to the present, but to the future 
world. Rome effaced the distinctions, the fretting 
discords of Celtic tribes, and traced the bounds of 

imply, the French Revolution of 1789. It was the bloody 
struggle of 1642-51 that made 1688 possible. The true com- 
parison — if any comparison be possible between revolutions so 
widely different in their aims and results, though following 
each other closely in the outward sequence of incident and 
character — would be between the Puritan struggle and the first 
revolutionary period in France, and between 1688 and the 
flight of James II, and 1830 and the abdication of Charles X. 
Both Guizot, whose memoirs of the English Revolution had 
appeared in 1826, and his master Louis Philippe intended that 
France should draw this comparison — the latter by the title 
" King of the French " adroitly touching the imagination or 
the vanity, whilst deceiving the intelligence, of the nation. 



NATIONALITY AND IMPERIALISM 99 

that Gallia which Meerwing and Karling, Capet and 
Bourbon, made it their ambition to reach, and their 
glory to maintain. To the cities of the Italian allies 
Rome granted immunities, privileges, of municipal 
independence ; and from the gift, as from a seed of 
hate, grew the interminable strife, the petty wars 
of the Middle Age. For this, Machiavelli, in many 
a bitter paragraph, has execrated the Papacy — 
" the stone thrust into the side of Italy to keep the 
wound open " — but the political creed of the great 
Ghibellines, Farinata, or Dante himself, shows that 
Italian republicanism, like French nationality, de- 
rives not from papal, but from imperial Rome. 

The study of Holland, of the history of Denmark, 
of Prussia, of Sweden, of Scotland, does but illus- 
trate the observation that in the principle of Nation- 
ality, whether in its origin or its ends, no ideal wide 
as humanity is involved, nothing that is not tran- 
sient, local, or derived. Poetry and heroism have 
in the past clothed it with undying fame; but re- 
cent history, by instance and by argument from Eu- 
rope and from other continents, has proved that a 
young nation may be old in corruption, and a small 
State great in oppression, that right is not always on 
the side of weakness, nor injustice with the strong. 

Not for the first time in history are these two 
principles. Nationality and Imperialism, or princi- 
ples strikingly analogous, arrayed against each other. 
Modern Europe, as we have seen, is a complexus of 
States, of which the Nation is the constituent unit. 



lOO THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

Ancient Hellas presents a similar complexus of 
States, of which the unit was not the Nation but 
the City. There, after the Persian Wars, these com- 
munities present a conflict of principles similar to 
this which now confronts us, a conflict between the 
ideals of civic independence and civic imperialism. 
And the conflict is attended by similar phenomena, 
covert hostility, jealous execration, and finally, uni- 
versal war. The issue is known. 

The defeat of Athens at Syracuse, involving in- 
evitably the fall of her empire, w'as a disaster to 
humanity. The spring of Athenian energy was 
broken, and the one State which Hellas ever pro- 
duced capable at once of government and of a lofty 
ideal, intellectual and political, was a ruin. Neither 
Sparta nor Macedon could take its place, and after 
the lingering degradation of two centuries Hellas 
succumbs to Rome. 

A disaster in South x^frica would have been just 
such a disaster as this, but on a wider and more 
terrible scale. 

For this empire is built upon a design more lib- 
eral even than that of Athens or the Rome of the 
Antonines. Britain conquers, but by the testimony 
of men of all races who have found refuge within 
her confines, she conquers less for herself than for 
humanity. " The earth is Man's " might be her 
watchword, and, as if she had caught the Ocean's 
secret, her empire is the highway of nations. That 



THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY loi 

province, that territory, that state which is added to 
her sway, seems thereby redeemed for humanity 
rather than conquered for her own sons. 

This, then, is the first characteristic of the war, 
a conflict between the two principles, the moribund 
principle of Nationality — in the Transvaal an op- 
pressive, an artificial nationality — and the vital 
principle of the future. 

§ 3. THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY 

But the war in South Africa has a second charac- 
teristic not less significant. It is the first great war 
waged by the completely constituted democracy of 
1884. In the third Reform Bill, as we have seen, 
the efforts of six centuries of constitutional history 
find their realisation. The heroic action and the 
heroic insight, the energy, the fortitude, the suffer- 
ing, from the days of Langton and de Montfort, 
Bigod and Morton, to those of Canning and Peel, 
Russell and Bright, attain in this Act their consum- 
mation and their end. The wars waged by the un- 
reformed or partially reformed constituencies con- 
tiue in their constitutional character the wars waged 
by the Monarchy or by the Whig or Tory oligar- 
chies of last century. But in the present conflict 
a democracy, at once imperial, self-governing and 
warlike, and actuated by the loftiest ideals, con- 
fronts the world. 

Twice and twice only in recorded history have 



I02 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

these qualities appeared together and simultane- 
ously in one people, in the Athens of Pericles and 
the Islam of Omar.-^ 

Revolutionary France was inspired by a dazzling 
dream, an exalted purpose, but its imperialism was 
the creation of the genius or the ambition of the 
individual; it was not rooted in the heart of the 
race. It was not Clive merely who gained India 
for England. French incapacity for the govern- 
ment of others, for empire, in a word, fought on 
our side. Napoleon knew this. What a study are 

27 I have employed the phrase " Islam of Omar " throughout 
the present work as a means of designating the period of 
nine-and-twenty years between the death of Mohammed, I2th 
Rabi I. II A. H,, June 8th, A. d. 632, and the assassination of 
Ah, 17th Hamzan, 40 A. h., January 27th, A. D. 661. Even in 
the Hfetime of Mohammed the genius and personaHty of Omar 
made themselves distinctly felt. During the caliphate of Abu 
Bekr the power of Omar was analogous to that of Hildebrand 
during the two pontificates which immediately precede his 
own. Omar's is the determining force, the will, and through- 
out his own, and the caliphates of Osman and Ali which fol- 
low, that force and that will impart its distinction and its 
direction to the course of the political life of Islam. The 
nature and extent of the sway of this extraordinary mind 
mark an epoch in world-history not less memorable than the 
Rome of Sulla or the Athens of Pericles. From the Arab 
historians a portrait that is fairly convincing can be arranged, 
and the threat or promise with which he is said to have an- 
nounced the purpose for which he undertook the caliphate is 
consonant with the impression of his appearance and manners 
which tradition has preserved — "He that is weakest among 
you shall be, in my sight, as the strongest until I have made 
good his rights unto him ; but he that is strongest shall I deal 
with like the weakest until he submit himself to the Law." 



THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY 103 

those bulletins of his! After Austerlitz, after 
Jena, Eylau, Friedland, one iteration, assurance and 
reassurance, " This is the last, the very last cam- 
paign ! " and so on till Waterloo. His Corsican in- 
tensity, the superhuman power of that mighty will, 
transformed the character of the French race, but 
not forever. The Celtic element was too strong 
for him, and in the French noblesse he found an 
index to the whole nation. The sarcasm, which if 
he did not utter he certainly prompted, has not lost 
its edge — " I showed them the path to glory and 
they refused to tread it; I opened my drawing-room 
doors and they rushed in, in crowds." There is 
nothing more tragic in history than the spectacle 
of this man of unparalleled administrative and 
political genius, fettered by the past, and at length 
grown desperate, abandoning himself to his weird. 
The march into Russia is the return upon the dai- 
monic spirit of its primitive instincts. The benefi- 
cent ruler is merged once more in the visionary of 
earlier times, dreaming by the Nile, or asleep on the 
heel of a cannon on board the Muiron.^^ Napoleon 

28 Thwarted in his schemes of world-conquest in the East by- 
Nelson and Sir Sidney Smith, Bonaparte returned to pursue 
in Europe the same visionary but mighty designs. In Napo- 
leon's career the voyage of the Frigate Muiron marks the 
moment analogous to Caesar's return from Gaul, January, 49 
B. c. But Caius Julius crossed the Rubicon at the head of 
fifty thousand men. Bonaparte returned from Egypt alone. 
The best soldiers of his staff indeed accompanied him, Lannes, 
the " Roland " of the battles of the Empire, Murat, Bessieres, 
Marmont, Lavalette, but to a resolute government this would 



104 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

was fighting for a dead ideal with the strength of 
the men who had overthrown that ideal — how 
should he prosper? Conquest of England, Spain, 
Austria, the Rhine frontier, Holland, Belgium, 
point by point his policy repeats Bourbon policy, 
the policy that led Louis XVI to the scaffold and 
himself to Ste. Helene. Yet his first battles were 
for liberty, and his last made the return of medi- 
ccval despotism impossible. Dying, he bequeaths 
imperialism to France as Euphorion leaves his ves- 
ture in the hands of Faust and Helena. How fatal 
was that gift of a spurious imperialism Metz, 
Sedan, and Paris made clear to all men. 

The Rome of the Caesars presents successively a 
veiled despotism, a capricious military tyranny, or 
an oriental absolutism. The " Serrar del Con- 
siglio " made Venice and her empire the paragon of 
oligarchic States. 

The rise of the empire of Spain seems in its na- 
tional enthusiasm to offer a closer parallel to this 
of Britain. But a ruthless fanaticism, religious 

but have blackened his desertion of Kleber and the army of 
the Pyramids. The adventure appears more desperate than 
Caesar's ; but speculation, anxiety, even hope, awaited Napo- 
leon at Paris. Moreau was no Pompey. The sequence of 
dates is interesting. On the night of August 22nd, 1799, 
Bonaparte went on board the frigate ; five weeks later, having 
just missed Nelson, he reached Ajaccio;. on October 9th he 
lands at Frejus, on the i6th he is at Paris, and resumes his 
residence in rue de la Victoire. Three weeks later, on Novem- 
ber 9th, occurs the incident known to history as i8th Bru- 
maire. 



THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY 105 

and political, stains from the outset the devotion 
of the Spanish people to their Hapsburg monarchs. 
Spain fought with grandeur, heroism, and with 
chivalrous resolution ; but her dark purpose, the sup- 
pression throughout Europe of freedom of the soul, 
made her valour frustrate and her devotion vain. 
She warred against the light, and the enemies of 
Spain were the friends of humanity, the benefactors 
of races and generations unborn. What criterion 
of truth, what principle even of party politics, can 
then incite a statesman and an historian to assert 
and to re-assert that in our war in South Africa we 
are acting as the Spanish acted against the ances- 
tors of the Dutch, and that our fate and our retri- 
bution will be as the fate and the retribution of 
Spain? England's ideal is not the ideal of Spain, 
nor are her methods the methods of Spain. The 
war in Africa — is it then a war waged for the de- 
struction of religious freedom throughout the 
world, or will the triumph of England establish the 
Inquisition in Pretoria ? But, it is urged, " the 
Dutch have never been conquered, they are of the 
same stubborn, unyielding stock as our own." In 
the sense that they are Teutons, the Dutch are of 
the same stock as the English; but the characteris- 
tics of the Batavian are not those of the Jute, the 
Viking, and the Norseman. The best blood of the 
Teutonic race for six centuries went to the making 
of England. At the period when the Batavians 
were the contented dependents of Burgundy or 



io6 THE Wx\R IN SOUTH AFRICA 

Flanders, the English nation was* being schooled by- 
struggle and by suffering for the empire of the fu- 
ture. As for the former clause of the assertion, it 
is accurate of no race, no nation. The history of 
the United Provinces does not close with John de 
Witt and William III. Can those critics of the war 
who still point to William the Silent, and to the 
broken dykes, and to Leyden, have reviewed, even 
in Schlosser, the history of Holland in the eight- 
eenth century, the part of the Dutch in Frederick's 
wars, the turpitudes of the Peace of 1783, un- 
equalled in modern history, and in world-history 
never surpassed, or of the surrender of Namur to 
Joseph II, or of the braggadocio patriotism which 
that monarch tested by sending his ship down the 
Scheldt, or of the capitulation of Amsterdam to 
Brunswick ? 

The heroic period of the United Provinces in 
action, art, and literature began and ended in the 
deep-hearted resolution of the race to perish rather 
than forego the right to worship God in their own 
way. In the history of this State, from Philip II 
to Louis XIV, religious oppression seems to play a 
part almost like that of individual genius in Mace- 
don or in modern France. When that force is 
withdrawn, there is an end to the greatness of Hol- 
land, as when a Charlemagne, an Alexander, or a 
Napoleon dies, the greatness of their empires dies 
also. In the passion for political greatness as such, 
the Dutch have never found the spur, the incitement 



THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY 107 

to heroic action or to heroic self-renunciation which 
reHgion for a time supplied. 

From false judgments false deeds follow, else it 
were but harsh ingratitude to recall, or even to re- 
member, the decay, the humiliations of the land 
within whose borders Rembrandt and Spinoza, Von- 
del and Grotius, Cornelius and John de Witt lived, 
worked, and suffered. 

But in the empire which fell at Syracuse we en- 
counter resemblances to the democratic Empire of 
Britain, deeper and more organic, and of an im- 
pressive and even tragic significance. For though 
the stage on which Athens acts her part is narrower, 
the idea which informs the action is not less ele- 
vated and serene. A purpose yet more exultant, a 
hope as living, and an impulse yet more mystic and 
transcendent, sweeps the warriors of Islam beyond 
the Euphrates eastward to the Indus, then through 
Syria, beyond the Nile to Carthage and the Western 
Sea, tracing within the quarter of a century domi- 
nated by the genius of Omar the bounds of an em- 
pire which Rome scarce attains in two hundred 
years. But this empire-republic, the Islam of Omar, 
passes swifter than a dream; the tyranny and the 
crimes of the palaces of Damascus and Bagdad 
succeed. 

And now after twelve centuries a democratic 
Empire, raised up and exalted for ends as mystic 
and sublime as those of Athens and the Islam of 
Omar, appears upon the world-stage, and the ques- 



io8 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

tion of questions to every student of speculative 
politics at the present hour is — Whither will this 
portent direct its energies? Will it press onward 
towards some yet mightier endeavour, or, mastered 
by some hereditary taint, sink torpid and neglectful, 
leaving its vast, its practically inexhaustible forces 
to waste unused? 

The deeds on the battlefield, the spirit which fires 
the men from every region of that empire and from 
every section of that society of nations, the attitude 
which has marked that people and that race towards 
the present war, are not without deep significance. 
Now at last the name English People is co-extensive 
and of equal meaning with the English race. The 
distinctions of rank, of intellectual or social en- 
vironment, of birth, of political or religious creeds, 
professions, are all in that great act forgotten and 
are as if they were not. Rivals in valour, emulous 
in self-renunciation, contending for the place of 
danger, hardship, trial, the}'- seem as if every man 
felt within his heart the emotion of iEschines see- 
ing the glory of Macedon — " Our life scarce seemed 
that of mortals, nor the achievements of our 
time." Contemplating this spectacle, this Empire 
thrilled throughout its vast bulk, from bound to 
bound of its far-stretched greatness, with one hope, 
one energy, one aspiration and one fear, one sorrow 
and one joy, is not this some warrant, is not this 
some presage of the future, and of the course which 
this people will pursue? 



THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY 109 

Let us pause here for a moment upon the trans- 
formation which this word EngHsh People has 
undergone. When Froissart, for instance, in the 
fourteenth century, speaks of the EngHsh People, 
he sees before him the chivalrous nobles of the type 
of Chandos or Talbot, the Black Prince or de 
Bohun. The work of the archers at Crecy and 
Poitiers extended the term to English yeomen, and 
with the rise of towns and the spread of maritime 
adventure the merchant and the trader are included 
under the same great designation as feudal knight 
and baron, 

Puritanism and the Civil Wars widened the term 
still further, but as late as the time of Chatham its 
general use is restricted to the ranks which it cov- 
ered in the sixteenth century. Thus when Chatham 
or Burke speaks of the English People, it is the 
merchants of a town like Bristol, as opposed to the 
English nobles, that he has in view.. And Welling- 
ton declared that Eton and Harrow bred the spirit 
which overcame Napoleon, which stormed Bada- 
joz, and led the charge at Waterloo. The Duke's 
hostility to Reform, his reluctance to extend the 
term, with its responsibilities and its privileges, its 
burdens and its glory, to the whole race, is intel- 
ligible enough. But in this point the admirers of 
the Duke wefe wiser or more reckless than their 
hero, and the followers of Pitt than the followers 
of Chatham. The hazard of enfranchising the mil- 
lions, of extending the word People to include every 



no THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

man of British blood, was a great, a breathless haz- 
ard. Might not a mob arise like that which gath- 
ered round the Jacobins, or by their fury and their 
rage added another horror to the horror of the vic- 
tim on the tumbril, making the guillotine a welcome 
release ? 

But the hazard has been made, the enfranchise- 
ment is complete, and it is a winning hazard. To 
Eton and Harrow, as nurseries of valour, the Duke 
would now require to add every national, every vil- 
lage school, from Bethnal Green to Ballycroy! 
Populus Anglicamis — it has risen in its might, and 
sent forth its sons, and not a man of them but 
seems on fire to rival the gallantry, the renunciation 
of Chandos and Talbot, of Sidney and Wolfe. Has 
not the present war given a harvest of instances? 
The soldier after Spion Kop, his jaw torn off, death 
threatening him, signs for paper and pencil to write, 
not a farewell message to wife or kin, but Wolfe's 
question on the Plains of Abraham — " Have we 
won ? " Another, his side raked by a hideous 
wound, dying, breathes out the undying resolution 
of his heart, " Roll me aside, men, and go on ! " 
Nor less heroic that sergeant, ambushed and sum- 
moned at great odds to surrender. " Never ! " was 
the brief imperative response, and made tranquil by 
that word and that defiance, shot through the heart, 
he falls dead. This is the spirit of the ranks, this 
the bearing in death, this the faith in England's 
ideal of the enfranchised masses. 



THE WAR OF A DEMOCRACY in 

Nor has the spirit of Eton and Harrow abated. 
Neither the Peninsular nor the Marlborough wars, 
conspicuous by their examples of daring, exhibit 
anything that within a brief space quite equals the 
self-immolating valour displayed in the disastrous 
openings of this war by those youths, the gens Fabia 
of modern days, prodigal of their blood, rushing 
into the Mauser hailstorm, as if in jest each man 
had sworn to make the sterile veldt blossom like 
the rose, fertilising it with the rich drops of his 
heart, since the rain is powerless ! 

§ 4. COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM 

Nor is this heroism, and the devotion which in- 
spires it, shut within the tented field or confined 
to the battle-line. The eyes of the race are upon 
that drama, and the heart of the race beats within 
the breasts of the actors. There is something 
Roman in the nation's unmoved purpose, the con- 
centration of its whole force upon one fixed mark, 
disregarding the judgment of men, realising, how- 
ever bitter the wisdom, that the Empire which the 
sword and the death-defiant valour of the past have 
upraised can be maintained only by the sword and 
a valour not less death-defiant, a self-renunciation 
not less heroic. 

Such manifestations of heroism and of a zeal- 
ous ardour, unexampled in its extent and its in- 
tensity, offer assuredly, I repeat, some augury, 
some earnest of that which' is to come, some pledge 



112 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

to the new century rising like a planet tremulous 
on the horizon's verge. 

But a widespread error still confounds this im- 
perial patriotism with Cosmopolitanism, this resolu- 
tion of a great people with Jingoism. Now what 
is Cosmopolitanism? It is an attitude of mind 
purely negative; it is a characteristic of protected 
nationalities, and of decayed races. It passes easily 
into political indifference, political apathy. It is the 
negation of patriotism ; but it offers no constructive 
ideal in its stead. Imperialism is active, it is con- 
structive.^^ It is the passion of Marathon and Traf- 
algar, it is the patriotism of a de IMontfort or a 
Grenville, at once intensified and heightened by the 
aspirations of humanity, by the ideals of a Shelley, 
a Wilberforce, or a Canning. But between mere 
war-fever, Jingoism, and such free, unfettered en- 
thusiasm, a nation's unaltering loyalty in defeat or 
in triumph to an ideal born of its past, and its joy 
in the actions in which this ideal is realised, the gulf 
is wide. Napoleon knew this. Nothing in history 
is more illuminating than the bitter remark with 
which he turned away from the sight of the en- 
thusiasm witli which Vienna welcomed its defeated 

-9 The Empire of Rome, of Alexander, of Britain, is not even 
the antagonist of what is essential in Cosmopolitanism. Rome, 
Hellas, Britain possess by God or Fate the power to govern 
to a more excellent degree than other States — Imperialism is 
the realisation of this power. Cosmopolitanism's laisses-faire 
is anarchism or it is the betrayal of humanity. 



COSMOPOLITANISM AND JINGOISM 113 

sovereign, Francis II. All his victories could not 
purchase him that! 

Would the critics of " music-hall madness " pre- 
fer to see a city stand sullen, silent, indifferent, 
cursing in the bitterness of its heart the government, 
the army, the empire? Or would they have it like 
the Roman mob of the first Caesars, cluster in 
croMrds, careless of empire, battles, or the glory of 
Rome's name, shouting for a loaf of bread and a 
circus ticket? Between the cries, the laughter, the 
tears of a mob and the speech or the silence of a 
statesman there is a great space; but it were rash 
to assume that the dissonant clamour of the crowds 
is but an ignorant or a transient frenzy. In reli- 
gion itself have we not similar variety of expres- 
sion? Those faces gathered under the trees or in 
a public thoroughfare — the expression of emotion 
there is not that which we witness, say, in Santa 
Croce, at prime, when the first light falls through 
the windows on Giotto's frescoes, Herod and Fran- 
cis, St. Louis and the Soldan, and on the few, the 
still worshippers — but dare we assert that this 
alone is sincere, the other unfelt because loud? 

§ 5. MILITARISM 

And yet beneath this joy, the tumultuous joy of 
this hour of respite from a hope that in the end 
became harder to endure than despair, there is per- 
haps not a single heart in this Empire which does 
not at moments start as at some menacing, some 



114 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

sinister sound, a foreboding of evil which it endeav- 
ours to shake off but cannot, for it returns, louder 
and more insistent, tyrannously demanding the at- 
tention of the most reluctant. Once more on this 
old earth of ours is witnessed the spectacle of a 
vast people stirred by one ideal, impulse prepared 
for all sacrifices for that ideal prepared to face war, 
and the outcry of a misunderstanding or envious 
antagonism. Whither is this impulse to be di- 
rected ? What minister or parliament is to dare the 
responsibility of turning this movement, this great 
and spontaneous movement, to this people's salva- 
tion, to this Empire's high purposes? How shall 
its bounds be made secure against encroachment, its 
own shores from coalesced foes? 

Let me approach this matter from the standpoint 
of history, the sole standpoint from which I have 
the right — to use a current phrase — to speak as 
an expert. First of all let me say, that an axiom 
or maxim which appears to guide the utterances if 
not the actions of statesmen, the maxim that the 
British people will under no circumstances tolerate 
any form of compulsory service for war, is unjusti- 
fied by history. It has no foundation in history at 
all. Nothing in the past justifies the ascription of 
such a limit to the devotion of this people. Of an 
ancient lineage, but young in empire, proud, loving 
freedom, not disdainful of glory, perfectly fearless 
— who shall assign bounds to its devotion or de- 
termine the limts of its endurance? I go further, I 



MILITARISM 115 

affirm that the records of the past, the heroic sacri- 
fices which England made in the sixteenth, in the 
seventeenth century, and in later times, justify the 
contrary assumption, justify the assumption that at 
this crisis — this grave and momentous crisis, a 
crisis such as I think no council of men has had to 
face for many centuries, perhaps not since the em- 
bassy of the Goths to the Emperor Valens — the 
ministry or cabinet which but dares, dares to trust 
this people's resolution, will find that this enthusi- 
asm is not that of men overwrought with war- fever, 
but the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to 
defend the heritage of its fathers, and not to swerve 
from the path which fate itself has marked out for 
it amongst the empires of the earth. This, I main- 
tain, is the verdict of history upon the matter. 

There is a second prominent argument against 
compulsory service, an argument drawn by analogy 
from the circumstances of other nations. Men 
point to Rennes, to the petty tyrannies of military 
upstarts over civilians in Germany, and cry, " Be- 
hold what awaits you from conscription ! " Such 
arguments have precisely the same value as the ar- 
guments against Parliamentary Reform fifty years 
ago, based on the terror of Jacobinism. We might 
as well condemn all free institutions because of 
Tammany Hall, as condemn compulsory service be- 
cause of its abuses in other countries. And an ap- 
peal to the Pretorians of Rome or to the Janizaries 
of the Ottoman empire would be as relevant as an 



ii6 THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA 

appeal for warning to the major-generals of Oliver 
Cromwell. Nor is there any fixed and necessary 
hostility between militarism and art, between mili- 
tarism and culture, as the Athens of Plato and of 
Sophocles, a military State, attests. 

All institutions are transfigured by the ideal 
which calls them into being. And this ideal of Im- 
perial Britain — to bring to the peoples of the earth 
beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher 
justice — the world has known none fairer, none 
more exalted, since that for which Grodfrey and 
Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St. 
Louis died. There is nothing in our annals which 
warrants evil presage from the spread of militarism, 
nothing which precludes the hope, the just confi- 
dence that our very blood and the ineffaceable char- 
acter of our race will save us from any mischief 
that militarism may have brought to others, and 
that in the future another chivalry may arise which 
shall be to other armies and other systems what 
the Imperial Parliament is to the parliaments of 
the world — a paragon and an example. 

With us the decision rests. If we should decide 
wrongly — it is not the loss of prestige, it is not the 
narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is the judgment 
of the dead, the despair of the living, of the inarti- 
culate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the ar- 
raigning eyes of the unborn. Who can confront 
this unappalled? 



CHAPTER V 

WHAT IS WAR? 

Assuming then that the imperialistic is the supreme 
form in the political development of the national 
as of the civic State, and that to the empires of the 
world belongs the government of the world in the 
future, and that in Britain a m.ode of imperialism 
which may be described as democratic displays it- 
self — a mode which in human history is rarely 
encountered, and never save at crises and fraught 
with consequences memorable to all time — the 
problem meets us, will this form of government 
make for peace or for war, considering peace and 
war not as mutual contradictories but as alterna- 
tives in the life of a State? Even a partial solution 
of this problem requires a consideration of the 
question "What is War?" 

§ I. THE PLACE OF WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY 

The question "What is War?" has been vari- 
ously answered, according as the aim of the writer 
is to illustrate its methods historically, or from the 
operations of the wars of the past to deduce pre- 
cepts for the tactics or the strategy of the present, 

"7 



ii8 WHAT IS WAR? 

or as in the writings of Aristotle and Grotius, of 
Montesquieu and Bluntschli, to assign the Hmits 
of its fury, or fix the basis of its ethics, its distinc- 
tion as just or unjust. But another aspect of the 
question concerns us here — What is War in itself 
and by itself? And what is its place in the life- 
history of a State considered as an entity, an organic 
unity, distinct from the unities which compose it? 
Is war a fixed or a transient condition of the po- 
litical life of man, and if permanent, does its relation 
to the world- force admit of description and defini- 
tion? 

If we were to adopt the method by which Aris- 
totle endeavoured to arrive at a correct conception 
of the nature of a State, and review the part which 
war has played in world-history, and, disregarding 
the mechanical enumeration of causes and effects, 
if we were to examine the motives, impulses, or 
ideals embodied in the great conflicts of world-his- 
tory, the question whether war be a necessary evil, 
an infliction to which humanity must resign itself, 
would be seen to emerge in another shape — 
whether war be an evil at all; whether in the life- 
history of a State it be not an attestation of the 
self-devotion of that State to the supreme end of its 
being, even of its power of consecration to the High- 
est Good? 

Every great war known to history resolves itself 
ultimately into the conflict of two ideals. The Cav- 
alier fights in triumph or defeat in a cause not less 



WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY 119 

exalted than that of the Puritan, and Salamis ac- 
quires a profaunder significance when considered, 
not from the standpoint of Athens and Themis- 
tocles merely, but from the camp of Xerxes, and the 
ruins of the mighty designs of Cyrus and Hystaspes, 
an incident which Aeschylus found tragic enough 
to form a theme for one of his loftiest trilogies.^*^ 
The wars a-gainst Pisa and Venice light with inter- 
mittent gleams the else sordid annals of Genoa; and 
through the grandeur and ferocity of a century of 
war Rome moves to world-empire, and Carthage 
to a death which throws a lustre over her history, 
making its least details memorable, investing its 
merchants with an interest beyond that of princes, 
and bequeathing to mankind the names of Hamilcar 
and Hannibal as a strong argument of man's great- 
ness if all other records were to perish. Qui habet 
terram habet bellum is but a half-truth. No war 
was ever waged for material ends only. Territory 
is a trophy of battle, but the origin of war is rooted 
in the character, the political genius, the imagina- 

30 The sea and the invincible might of Athens on the waves 
formed the connecting ideas of the three dramas, Phineus, 
PerscB, Glaucus. The trilogy was produced in 473 or 472 b. c, 
whilst the memory of Salamis was still fresh in every heart. 
The PhcenisscB, the " Women of Sidon," a tragedy on the 
same theme by Phrynichus, had been acted five years earlier. 
The distinction of these works lay in the presentation to the 
conquering State of a great victory as a tragedy in the life of 
the vanquished. The cry in the Persce, " wTrat'Ses ''EKKtjvuv ire" 
still echoes with singular fidelity across 3,000 years in the war- 
song of modern Greece : " Aeure iraldes tov ''EKkrivwv" 



I20 WHAT IS WAR? 

tion of the race. One of the profoundest of mod- 
ern investigators in mediseval history, Dr. Georg 
Waitz, insists on the attachment of the Teutonic 
kindred to the soil, and on the measures b)'- which in 
the primitive constitutions the war-instinct was 
checked.^ ^ The observation of Waitz is just, but a 
change in environment develops the latent qualities 
of a race. The restless and melancholy surge, the 
wide and desolate expanse of the North Sea ex- 
alted the imagination of the Viking as the desert 
the imagination of the Arab. Not the cry of 
" New lands " merely, but the adventurous heart of 
his race, lured on by the magic of the sea, its reced- 
ing horizons, its danger and its change, spread the 
fame and the terror of the Norsemen from the 
basilicas, the marbles, and the thronging palaces of 
Byzantium to the solitary homestead set in the Eng- 
lish forest-clearing, or in the wastes of Ireland 
which the zeal of her monasteries was slowly re- 
claiming. To the glamour of war for its own sake 

31 Thus in speaking of the ancient life of the Teutonic peo- 
ples: "Doch alles das (Neigung zum Kampf mit den Nach- 
barn und zu kriegerischen Ziigen in die Feme) hat nicht 
gehindert, dass, wo die Deutschen sich niederliessen, alsbald 
bestimmte Ordnungen des offentlichen und rechtlichen Lebens 
begriindet wurden." — Verfassungsgeschichte, 3rd ed., i, p. ig ; 
cf. also i, pp. 416-17 : " Es hat nicht eigene Kriegsvolker 
gegeben, gebildet durch und fiir den Krieg, nicht Kriegs- 
staaten in solchem Sinn, dass alles ganz und allein fiir den 
Krieg berechnet gewesen ware, nicht einmal auf die Dauer 
Kriegsfiirsten, deren Herrschaft nur in Kriegfiihrung und 
Heeresmacht ihren Grund gehabt." 



WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY 121 

the Crusades brought the transforming power of a 
new ideal. The cry " Deus vult!" at Clermont 
marks for the whole Teutonic race the final transi- 
tion from the type of Alaric and Chlodovech, of 
Cerdic and Hrolf, to that of Godfrey and Tancred, 
Richard Lion-heart and Saint Louis, from the sagas 
and the war-songs of the northern skalds to the 
chivalrous verse of the troubadours, a Bertrand or 
a Rudel, to the epic narrative of the crusades which 
transfigures at moments the prose of William of 
Tyre or of Orderic, of Geoffrey de Vinsauf or of 
Joinville. 

The wide acceptance of the territorial theory of 
the origin of war as an explanation of war, and the 
enumeration by historians of causes and results in 
territory or taxation, can be ascribed only to that 
indolence of the human mind, the subtle inertia 
which, as Tacitus affirms, lies in wait to mar all 
high endeavour — " Subit quippe etiam ipsius iner- 
tias dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo 
amatur." 

The wars of the Hebrews, if territorial in their 
apparent origin, reveal in their course their true 
origin in the heart of the race, the consciousness of 
the high destiny reserved for it amongst the Semitic 
kindred, amongst the nations of the earth. If ever 
there were a race which seemed destined to found 
a world-empire by the sword it is the Hebrew. They 
make war with Roman relentlessness and with 
more than Roman ideality, the Lord God of Hosts 



122 WHAT IS WAR? 

guiding their march or their retreat by day and by 
night ceaselessly. Every battle is a Lake Regillus, 
and for the great Twin Brethren it is Jehovah 
Sabaoth that nerves the right arm of his faithful. 
The forms of Gideon and Joshua, though on a nar- 
rower stage, have a place with those other captains 
of their race — Hannibal, Bar-Cochab, Khalid, 
Amr, Saad,^^ and Mothanna. The very spirit of 
war seems to shape their poetry from the first chant 
for the defeat of Egypt to that last song of con- 
stancy in overthrow, of unconquerable resolve and 

32 The lapse of ages, enthusiasm, or carelessness, tribal jeal- 
ousies or the accidental predilections of an individual poet or 
historian, combine to render the early history of the Arabs, 
so far as precision in dates, the definite order and mutual 
relations of events, characters, and localities are concerned, 
perplexing and insecure, or tantalising by the wealth of de- 
tail, impressive indeed, but eluding the test of historical criti- 
cism. Their tactics and the composition of their armies make 
the precise share of this or that general in determining the 
result of a battle or a campaign difficult to estimate. Yet by 
the concord of authorities the glory of the overthrow? of the 
Empire of the Sassanides seems to be the portion, first of Mot- 
hanna, who sustained the fortunes of Islam at a most critical 
hour, A. H. 13-14, and by his victory at Boawib just warded 
oflf a great disaster ; and secondly of Saad, the victor of Kade- 
sia, A. H. 15 A. D. 636-7, the conqueror and first administrator 
of Irak. The claims of Amr, or Amrou, to the conquest of 
Egypt, Pelusium, Memphis, Alexandria, a, d. 638, admit of 
hardly a doubt; whilst the distinction of Khalid, "the Sword 
of God," in the Syrian War at the storming of Damascus 
and in the crushing defeat of Heraclius at the Yermuk, Au- 
gust, A. D. 634, may justly entitle him to the designation — if 
that description can be applied to any one of the devoted band 
— of " Conqueror of Syria." 



WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY 123 

sure vengeance, a march music befitting Judas Mac- 
cabaeus and his men, beside which all other war- 
songs, even the " Marseillaise," appear o£ no ac- 
count — the Al Naharoth Babel — " Let my sword- 
hand forget, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem " — pass- 
ing from the mood of pity through words that are 
like the flash of spears to a rapture of revenge 
known only to the injured spirits of the great when 
baulked of their God-appointed fate. Yet on the 
shores of the Western Sea the career of this race 
abruptly ends, as if in Palestine they found a Capua, 
as the Crusaders long afterwards. Templars and 
Hospitallers, found in that languid air, the Syrian 
clime, a Capua. Thus the Hebrews missed the 
world-empire which the Arabs gained, but even out 
of their despair created another empire, the empire 
of thought; and the power to found this empire, 
whether expressed in the character of their warriors, 
or in that unparalleled conviction which marks the 
Hebrew in the remotest lands and most distant cen- 
turies, the certainty of his return, the refusal, un- 
yielding, to believe that he has missed the great 
meed which, there in Palestine, there in the Capua of 
his race, seemed within his grasp, but attests further 
that it is in no lust for territory that these wars 
originate. 

In the historical and speculative literature of 
Hellas and Rome war occupies a position essen- 
tially identical with that which it occupies in the 
Hebrew. It is the assertion of right by violence, 



124 WHAT IS WAR? 

or it is the pursuit of a fate-appointed end. Aris- 
totle, with his inveterate habit of subjecting all 
things — art, statesmanship, poetry — to ethics, re- 
gards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a 
protection against the enervating influence of peace. 
As the life of the individual is divided between busi- 
ness and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the life 
of the State is divided between war and peace. But 
to greatness in peace, greatness in war is a primal 
condition. The State which cannot quit itself 
greatly in war will achieve nothing great in peace. 
'' The slave," he bitterly remarks, " knows no leis- 
ure, and the State which sets peace above war is in 
the condition of a slave." Aristotle does not mean 
that the slave is perpetually at work, or that war is 
the sole duty of a great State, but as the soul des- 
tined to slavery is incapable even in leisure of the 
contemplations of the soul destined to freedom, so to 
the nation which shrinks from war the greatness 
that belongs to peace can never come. Courage, 
Plato defines as " the knowledge of the things that 
a man should fear and that he should not fear," and 
in a state, a city, or an empire courage consists in 
the unfaltering pursuit of its being's end against all 
odds, when once that end is manifest. This ideal 
element, this formative principle, underlies the Hel- 
lenic conception of war throughout its history, from 
its first glorification in Achilles to the last combats 
of the Achaean League — from the divine beauty of 



WAR IN WORLD-HISTORY 125 

the youthful Achilles, dazzling as the lightning and 
like the lightning pitiless, yet redeemed to pathos by 
the certainty of the quick doom that awaits him, on 
to the last bright forms which fall at Leuctra, Man- 
tinea, and Ipsus. It requires a steadfast gaze not 
to turn aside revolted from the destroying fury of 
Greeks against Greeks — Athens, Thebes, Sparta, 
Corinth, and Macedon — and yet even their claim to 
live, their greatness, did in this consist, that for so 
light yet so immortal a cause they were content to 
resign the sweet air and the sight of the sun, and of 
this wondrous fabric of a world in which their pres- 
ence, theirs, the children of Hellas, was the divinest 
wonder of all. 

Of the grandeur and elevation which Rome im- 
parted to war and to man's nature it is superfluous 
to speak. As in statesmanship, so in war, he who 
would greatly praise another describes his excellence 
as Roman, and thinks that all is said. The silver 
eagle which Caius Marius gave as an ensign to the 
legions is for once in history the fit emblem of the 
race that bore it to victory and world-dominion. 
History by fate or chance added a touch of the 
supernatural to the action of Marius. The silver 
eagle announced the empire of the Csesars ; the sub- 
stitution of the Labarum by Constantine heralded 
its decline. With the emblem of humiliation and 
peace, the might of Rome sinks, yet throughout the 
centuries that follow, returns of galvanic life, recol- 



126 WHAT IS WAR? 

lections of its ancient valour — as in Stilicho, Belis- 
arius, Heraclius, and Zimisces^^ — bear far into the 
Middle Age the dread name of the Roman legion, 
though the circuit of the eagle's flight, once wide as 
the ambient air, is then narrowed to a league or 
two on either side of the Bosphorus. 

§ 2. DEFINITION OF WAR 

To push the survey further would but add to the 
instances, without deepening the impression, of the 
measureless power of the ideal element in war, alike 
in the history of the great races of the past and of 
the present. Even the wars which seem most arbi- 
trary and, to the judgment of their contemporaries, 
purposeless, acquire, upon a deeper scrutiny and in 
after ages, a profound enough significance. Behind 
the immediate occasion, trivial or capricious, sordid 
or grandiose, the destiny of the race, like the Nem- 
esis of Greek Tragedy, advancing relentlessly, pur- 

33 " The twelve years of their military command (i.e., of 
Nicephorus and Zimisces) form the most splendid period of 
the Byzantine annals. The sieges of Mopsuestia and Tarsus 
in Silicia first exercised the skill and perseverance of their 
troops, on whom at this moment I shall not hesitate to bestow 
the name of Romans." — Gibbon, chap. lii. The reign of Zim- 
isces, A. D. 969-76, forms the subject of the opening chapters, 
pp. 1-326, of Schlumberger's massive work, L'epopee Byzan- 
tine a la Hn du dixieme siecle, Paris, 1896, which exhausts 
every resource of modern research into this period. Zimisces' 
rise to power, and the career of the other heroic figure of the 
tenth century in Byzantine history are dealt with not less ex- 
haustively in Schlumberger's earlier volume, Un Empergur 
bysantin, Paris, 1890. 



DEFINITION OF WAR 127 

suing its own far-off and lofty ends, constantly re- 
veals itself. 

War, therefore, I would define as a phase in the 
life-effort of the State towards completer self-reali- 
sation, a phase of the eternal nisus, the perpetual 
omnipresent strife of all being towards self-fulfil- 
ment. Destruction is not its aim, but the intensifi- 
cation of the life, whether of the conquering or of 
the conquered State. War is thus a manifestation 
of the world-spirit in the form the most sublime 
and awful that can enthrall the contemplation of 
man. It is an action radiating from the same source 
as the heroisms, the essential agonies, dywvlai, con- 
flicts, of all life. " In this theatre of a world," as 
Calderon avers, " all are actors, todos son repre- 
sentantes." There too the State enacts its tragedy. 
Nation, city, or empire, it too is a representante. 
Though the stage is of more imposing dimensions, 
the Force of which each wears the mask is one with 
the Force which sets the stars their path and guides 
the soul of man to its appointed goal. A war then is 
in the development of the consciousness of the State 
analogous to those moments in the individual career 
when, in Hamlet's phrase, his fate " crying out," 
death is preferable to a disregard of the Summoner. 
The state, the nation, or the empire hazards death, 
is content to resign existence itself, if so be it fulfil 
but its destiny, and swerve not from its being's law. 
Not to be envied is that man who, in the solemn 
prayer of two embattled hosts, can discern but an 



128 WHAT IS WAR? 

organised hypocrisy, a mockery, an insult to God! 
God is the God of all the earth, but dark are the 
ways, obscure and tangled the forest-paths, in which 
He makes His children walk. A mockery? That 
cry for guidance in the dread ordeal, that prayer by 
the hosts, which is but the formulated utterance of 
the still, the unwhispered prayer in the heart of 
each man on the tented field — " Through death to 
life, even through death to hfe, as my country fares 
on its great path through the thickening shadows to 
the greater light, to the higher freedom! " — is this 
a mockery? Yet such is the prayer of armies. War 
so considered ceases to be an action continually to 
be deplored, regretted, or forgiven, ceases to be the 
offspring of human weakness or human crime, and 
the sentence of the Greek orator recovers its living 
and consoling power — "Of the dead who have 
fallen in battle the wide earth itself is the sepulchre ; 
their tomb is not the grave in which they are laid, 
but the undying memory of the generations that 
come after them. They perish, snatched in a mo- 
ment, in the height of achievement, not from their 
fear, but from their renown. Fortunate! And 
you who have lost them, you, who as mortal have 
been bom subject unto disaster, how fortunate are 
you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape ? " 
Thus the great part which war has played in hu- 
man histor\', in art, in poetry, is not, as Rousseau 
maintains, an arraignment of the human heart, not 
necessarily the blazon of human depravity, but a tes- 



TOLSTOI UPON WAR 129 

timony to man's limitless capacity for devotion to 
other ends than existence for existence' sake — his 
pursuit of an ideal, perpetually. 

§ 3. COUNT TOLSTOI AND CARLYLE UPON WAR 

Those critics of the relations of State to State, of 
nation to nation, to whom I have more than once 
referred, have recently found in their condemnation 
of diplomacy and war a remarkable and powerful 
ally. Amongst the rulers of thought, the sceptred 
sovereigns of the modem mind, Count Tolstoi occu- 
pies, in the beginning of the twentieth century, a 
unique position, not without exterior resemblance 
to that of Goethe in the beginning of th'e nineteenth, 
or to that of Voltaire in the great days of Louis 
XV. In the grey and neutral region where the 
spheres of religion and ethics meet and blend, his 
words, almost as soon as spoken, rivet the attention, 
quicken the energies, or provoke the hostility of one- 
half the world — when he speaks, he speaks not to 
Russia merely, but to Europe, to America, and to 
the wide but undefined limits of Greater Britain. 
Of no other living writer can this be said. Carlyle 
had no such extended sway in his lifetime, nor had 
Hugo so instantly a universal hearing. 

How then does Tolstoi regard War ? For on this 
high matter the judgment of such a man cannot but 
claim earnest scrutiny. Examining his writings, 
even from The Cossacks, through such a master- 
piece as War and Peace, colossal at once in design 



130 WHAT IS WAR? 

and in execution, on to his latest philosophical pam- 
phlets or paragraphs, one phase at least of his 
thought reveals itself — gradually increasing vehe- 
mence in the expression of his abhorrence of all war 
as the instrument of oppression, the enemy of man's 
advance to the ideal state, forbidden by God, for- 
bidden above all by Christ, and by its continued ex- 
istence turning our professed faith in Christ into a 
derision. This general impression is deepened by 
his treatment of individual incidents and characters.. 
Has Count Tolstoi a campaign to narrate, or a bat- 
tle, say the Borodino, to describe? That which 
rivets his attention, absorbs his energies, is the fa- 
tuity of all the generals indiscriminately, even of 
Kutusov; it is the supremacy of Hazard; and in the 
hour of battle itself he sees no heroisms, no devo- 
tions, or he turns aside from such spectacles to fas- 
ten his gaze upon the shuddering heart, the blanched 
countenance, the agonising effort of the combatants 
to conquer their own terror, their own dismay ; and 
to close the scene he throws wide the hospital, and 
points to the wounds, the mutilated bodies, the ampu- 
tated limbs yet quivering, to the fever, and the revel 
of death. Has he the enigma of modern times to 
solve, Napoleon I ? In Napoleon, who in the sphere 
of action is to Modern History what Shakespeare is 
in the sphere of art, Tolstoi sees no more than the 
clerical harlequin, Abbe de Pradt, sees, a stage con- 
queror, a charlatan devoured by vanity, without 
greatness, dignity, without genius for war yet im- 



TOLSTOI UPON WAR 131 

patient of peace, shallow of intellect, tricking and 
tricked by all around him, dooming myriads to death 
for the amusement of' an hour, yet on the dread 
morning of Borodino anxious only about the quality 
of the eau de Cologne with which he lavishly sprin- 
kles his handkerchief, vest, and coat. And the cam- 
paigns of Napoleon, republican, consular, imperial? 
Lodi, Areola, Marengo, Austerlitz, Eylau, Fried- 
land, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig, Champaubert, 
and Montmirail? These all are the deeds of 
Chance, of happy Chance, the guide that is no guide, 
of the eyeless, brutal, dark, unthinking force resi- 
dent in masses of men. This is Tolstoi's concep- 
tion of the man who is to the Aryan race what 
Hannibal is to the Semitic — its crowning glory in 
war. 

Consider in contrast with this the attitude to- 
wards war of a thinker, a visionary, not less great 
than Tolstoi — Carlyle. Like Tolstoi, Carlyle is 
above all things a prophet, that is to say, he feels as 
the Hebrew prophet felt, deeply and with resentful 
passionateness, the contrast between what his race, 
nation, or people is, and what, by God's decrees, it is 
meant to be. Yet what is Carlyle's judgment upon 
war? His work is the witness. After the brief 
period of Goethe-worship, from 1834 on through 
forty years of monastic seclusion and labour not 
monastic, but as of a literary Hercules, the shaping 
thought of his work, tyrannous and all-pervading, is 
that of the might, the majesty, and the mystery of 



132 WHAT IS WAR? 

war. One flame-picture after another sets this 
principle forth. What a contrast are his battle- 
paintings to those of Tolstoi! Consider the long 
array of them from the first engagements of the 
French Revolutionary chiefs at Valmy and Jemap- 
pes. These represent Carlyle in the flush of man- 
hood. His fiftieth year ushers in the battle-pictures 
of the Civil War — Marston Moor, Naseby, and 
Dunbar, when Cromwell defeats the men of Car- 
lyle's own nation. The greatest epoch of Carlyle's 
life, the epoch of the writing of Frederick, is also 
that of the mightiest series of his battle-paintings. 
And finally, when his course is nearly run, he rouses 
himself to write the last of all his battles, yet at 
once in characterisation and vividness of heroic vi- 
sion one of his finest, the death of the great Ber- 
serker, Olaf Tryggvason, the old Norse king. In 
the last sea-fight of Olaf there flames up within Car- 
lyle's spirit, now in extreme age,^^ the same glory 
and delight in war as in the days of his early man- 
hood when he wrote Valmy and Jemappes. Since 
the heroic age there are no such battle-pictures as 
these. The spirit of war that leaps and laughs 
within these pages is the spirit of Homer and Fir- 
dusi, of Beonndf and the Song of Roland, and 
when it sank, it was like the going down of a sun. 

2* Carlyle was in his seventy-seventh year when he com- 
pleted the Early Kings of Norway. " Finished yesterday that 
long rigmarole upon the Norse kings " is the comment in his 
Journal under date February 15th, 1872. — Froude, Carlyle's 
Life in London, vol. ii. p. 411. 



CARLYLE UPON WAR 133 

The breath that blows through the Iliad stirs the 
pages of Cromwell and of Frederick; Mollwitz, 
Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf, Leignltz, and Tor- 
gau, these are to the delineation, the exposition of 
modern warfare, the warfare of strategy and of 
tactics, what the combats drawn by Homer are to 
the warfare of earlier times. 

Now in a mind not less profoundly religious than 
that of Tolstoi, not less fixedly conscious of the 
Eternal behind the transient, of the Presence unseen 
that shapes all this visible universe, whence comes 
this exaltation of war, this life-long pre-occupation 
with the circumstance of war? To Carlyle, nine- 
teen centuries after Christ, as to Thucydides, four 
centuries before Christ, war is the supreme expres- 
sion of the energy of a State as such, the supreme, 
the tragic hour, in the life-history of the city, the 
nation, as such. To Carlyle war is therefore neither 
anti-religious nor inhuman, but the evidence in the 
life of a State of a self-consecration to an ideal end; 
it is that manifestation of the world-spirit of which 
I have 'spoken above — a race, a nation, an empire, 
conscious of its destiny, hazarding all upon the for- 
tunes of the stricken field ! Carlyle, as his writings, 
as his recorded actions approve, was not less sensi- 
tive than Tolstoi to the pity of human life, to the 
" tears of things " as Virgil would say ; but are 
there not in every city, in every town, hospitals, 
wounds, mangled limbs, fevers, that make of every 
day of this, sad earth of ours a day after Borodino? 



134 WHAT IS WAR? 

The life that pants out its spirit, exultant on the 
battlefield, knows but its own suffering ; it is the eye 
of the onlooker which discovers the united agony. 
It was a profounder vision, a wider outlook, not a 
harder heart, which made Carlyle ^^ apparently blind 
to that side of war which alone rivets the attention 
of Tolstoi — the pathological. And yet Tolstoi aiid 
his house have for generations been loyal to the 
Czars; he has proved that loyalty on the battlefield 
as his fathers before him have done. Tolstoi has no 
system to crown, like Auguste Comte or Mr. Her- 
bert Spencer, with the coping-stone of universal 
peace and a world all sunk in bovine content. 
Whither then shall we turn for an explanation of 
his arraignment of war? 

§ 4. COUNT TOLSTOI AS REPRESENTATIVE OF 
THE SLAVONIC GENIUS 

Considering Tolstoi as a world-ruler, as Goethe 
was, as Voltaire was, a characteristic differenti- 
ating him from such men at once betrays itself. 
The nimble spirit of Voltaire in its airy imaginings 
seems a native, or at least a charming visitant, of 
every clime, of every epoch; Goethe, impelled more 
by his innate disposition than by any plan of culture, 
draws strength and inspiration from a circuit even 

35 Mr. Herbert Spencer's characterisation of Carlyle as a 
devil-worshipper {Data of Ethics, § 14) must be regarded less 
as an eflfort in serious criticism than as the retort, perhaps the 
just retort, of the injured evolutionist and utiHtarian to the 
Pig Philosophy of the eighth of the Latter-Day Pamphlets. 



SLAVONIC GENIUS 135 

wider than Voltaire's — Greece, Rome, Persia, Italy, 
the Middle Age, Mediaeval Germany; Carlyle's 
work made him, at least in spirit, a native of France 
for three or four years, and for twelve a German; 
even Dr. Henrik Ibsen in his hot youth essayed a 
Catiline, and in later life seeks the subject of what 
is perhaps his masterpiece, the Emperor and Gali- 
lean, in the Rome of the fourth century. But in 
Russia Tolstoi begins and in Russia he ends. As 
volume after volume proceeds from his prolific pen 
— essays, treatises theological or social, tales, novels, 
diaries, or confessions — all alike are Russian in 
scenery, Russian in character, Russian in tempera- 
ment, Russian in their aspirations, their hopes, or 
their despairs. Nowhere is there a trace of Hellas, 
Rome does not exist for him, the Middle Age which 
allured Hugo has for Tolstoi no glamour. In this 
he but resembles the Russian writers from Krilov 
to the present day. It is equally true of Gogol, of 
Poushkine, of Tourgenieff, of Herzen, of Lermon- 
toff, of Dostoievsky. If Tourgenieff has placed the 
scene of one of his four longer works at Baden, yet 
it is in the Russian coterie that the tragedy of Irene 
Pavlovna unfolds itself. Thus confined in his range, 
and in his inspiration, to his own race, the work 
of a Russian artist, or thinker, springs straight 
from the heart of the race itself. When therefore 
Tolstoi speaks on war, he voices not his own judg- 
ment merely but the judgment of the race. In his 
conception of war the force of the Slavonic race 



136 WHAT IS WAR? 

behind him masters his own individual genius. 
Capacity in a race for war is distinct from valour. 
Amongst the Aryan peoples, the Slav, the Hindoo, 
the Celt display valour, contempt for life unsur- 
passed, but unlike the Roman or the Teuton they 
have never by war sought the achievement of a 
great political design, or subordinated the other 
claims of existence, whether of the nation or the 
individual, for the realisation of a great political 
ideal. Thus the history of the two western divisions 
of the Slavonic race, Poland and Bohemia, reads like 
the history of Ireland. It is studded with combats, 
but there is no war. The downfall of Bohemia, 
the surrender of Prague, the Weissenberg, are but 
an illustration of this thesis. And three centuries 
earlier Ottokar and his flaunting chivalry go down 
before the charge of Rudolf of Hapsburg, like 
Vercingetorix before Caius Julius. Ziska's cry of 
havoc to all the earth is not redeemed by fanati- 
cism and has no intelligible end. And the noblest 
figure in Czech history, George of Podiebrad, whose 
portrait Palacky ^^ has etched with laborious care 

26 The Revolution of 1848 made the appearance of Palacky's 
work in the native language of Bohemia possible. Two vol- 
umes had already been issued in German. If ever the work 
of a scholar and an historian had the effect of a national song, 
this virtue may be ascribed to the Czech version of Palacky's 
Geschichte Bohmens. After two centuries of subjection to 
the Hapsburgs and apparent oblivion of her past, Bohemia 
awoke and discovered that she had a history. Of the seven 
volumes of the German edition, the period dominated by the 



SLAVONIC GENIUS 137 

and unerring insight, is essentially a statesman, 
not a warrior. 

Similarly the history of the Russian Slav has 
marked organic resemblances with that of the Poles 
and the Czechs. His sombre courage, his enduring 
fortitude, are a commonplace. Eylau and Friedland 
attested this, and many a later field, and the chron- 
icle of his recent wars, from Potiamkin to Skobeleff, 
from Kutusov to Todleben, illustrate the justice of 
Napoleon's verdict, " unparalleled heroism in de- 
fence." And yet out of the sword the Slav has 
never forged an instrument for the perfection of a 
great political ideal. War has served the oppression, 
the ambition of his governments, not the aspirations 
of his race. Conceived as the effort within the life 
of the State towards a higher self-realisation, the 
Slav knows not war. He has used war for defence 
in a manner memorable for ever to men, or for cold 
and pitiless aggression, but in the service of a con- 
structive ideal, stretched across generations or 
across centuries, he has never used it. Even the 
conquest of Siberia, from the first advance of the 
Novgorod merchants in the eleventh century, 
through the wars of Ivan IV, and his successors, 
attests this. The Don Cossacks destroy the last 
remnant of the mighty Mongol dynasty, a fragment 
flung off from the convulsion of the thirteenth 
century, ruled by a descendant of Ginghis. The 

personality of George of Podiebrad forms the subject of the 
fourth (Prague, 1857-60). 



138 WHAT IS WAR? 

government of the Czars astutely annexes the fruits 
of Cossack valour, but in the administration of 
its first remarkable conquest the irremediable defect 
of the Slavonic race declares itself. The innate 
energy, the determining genius for constructive poli- 
tics which marks races destined for empire, every- 
where is wanting. Indeed the very despotism of the 
Czars, alien in blood, foreign in character, derives its 
present security, as once its origin, from the immov- 
able languor, the unconquerable tendency of the 
Slav towards political indifferentism. Nihilism, the 
tortured revolt a'gainst a secular wrong, is but a 
morbid expression of emotions and aspirations that 
have marked the Slav throughout history. Cather- 
ine the Great felt this. Its spirit baulked her enter- 
prise in the very hour when Voltaire urged that now 
if ever was the opportunity to recover Constan- 
tinople from " the fanaticism of the Moslem." The 
impressive designs of Nicholas I left the heart of 
the race untouched, and in recent times the cynicism 
which has occasionally startled or revolted Europe 
is but a pseudo-Machiavellianism. It does not orig- 
inate, like the policy which a Polybius or a Machia- 
velli, a Richelieu or a Mirabeau have described or 
practised, in the pursuit of a majestic design before 
whose ends all must yield, but from the absence of 
such design, betraying the camerilla which has 
neither race nor nation, people nor city, behind it. 
Russia's mightiest adversary. Napoleon, knew the 
character of the race more intimately than its idol, 



CHRIST AND WAR 139 

Napoleon's adroit flatterer and false friend, the Czar 
Alexander, knew it; yet the enthusiast of Valerie, 
supple and calculating even in his mysticism, is still 
the noblest representative of the oppressive policy 
of two hundred years.^"^ 

Such is the light which the temperament of his 
race and its history throw upon Count Tolstoi's 
arraignment of war. The government perceives in 
the solitary thinker its adversary, but an adversary 
who, unlike a Bakounine, a Nekrasoff, or a Herzen, 
gives form and utterance not to the theories, the 
social or political doctrines of an individual or a 
party, but to the universal instincts of the whole 
Slavonic people. Therefore he will not die in exile. 
The bigotry of a priest may deny his remains a 
hallowed resting-place, but the government, in- 
structed by the craft of Nicholas I, and the fate of 
Alexander III, will allow the creator of Anna Kare- 
nina, of Natascha, and of Ivan Illyitch, to breathe 
to the last the air of the steppes. 

§ 5. THE TEACHINGS OF CHRIST AND WAR 

There remains an aspect of this question, fre- 
quently dealt with in the writings of Tolstoi, but 
by no means confined to these writings, to which I 
must allude briefly. There are many men within 

37 France has given the world the Revolution ; Germany, 
the Reformation; Italy, modern Art; but Russia? "We," 
Tourgeniefif once said, " we have given the samovar." But 
that poet's own works, the symphonies of Tschaikowsky, the 
one novel of Dostoievsky, have changed all this. 



I40 WHAT IS WAR? 

these islands, if I mistake not, who regard with 
pride and emotion the acts of England in this great 
crisis, but nevertheless are oppressed with a vague 
consciousness that war, for whatever cause waged, 
is, as Tolstoi declares, directly hostile to the com- 
mands, to the authority of Christ. This is a subject 
which I approach with reluctance, with reverence, 
more for the sake of those amongst you upon whom 
such conviction may have weighed, than from any 
value I attach to the suggestions I have now to offer. 
First of all, as we have seen from this brief survey 
of the wars of the past, the most religious of the 
great races of the world, and the most religious 
amomgst the divisions of those races — the Hebrews, 
the Romans, the Teutons, the Saracens, the Osmanli 
— have been the most warlike and have pursued 
in war the loftiest political ends. The fact is sig- 
nificant, because war, like religion and like language, 
represents not the individual but the race, the city, 
or the nation. In a work of art, the Phcedrus 
of Plato or the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian, 
the genius of the individual is, in appearance at 
least, sovereign and despotic. But as a language 
represents the happy moments of inspiration of 
myriads of unremembered poets, who divined the 
fit sound, the perfect word, harmonious or harsh, 
to embody for ever, and to all succeeding generations 
of the race, its recurring moods of desire or delight, 
of pain, or sorrow, or fear; and as in a religion the 
heart-aspirations towards the Divine of a long series 



CHRIST AND WAR 141 

of generations converge, by genius or fortune, into 
a flame-like intensity in a Zerdusht, a Mohammed, 
or a Gautama Buddha ; so war represents the action, 
the deed, not of the individual but of the race. 
Religion incarnates the thought, language the imagi- 
nation, war the resolution, the willj, of a race. 
Reflecting then on the part which war has played in 
the history of the most deeply religious races, and 
of those States in which the attributes of awe, of 
reverence are salient features, it is surely idle enough 
to essay an arraignment of war as opposed to reli- 
gion in general. 

Secondly, with regard to a particular religion, 
the Qiristian, it is remarkable that Count Tolstoi, 
who has striven so nobly to reach the faith beyond 
the creeds, and in his volume entitled My Religion 
has thrown out several illuminating ideas upon the 
teachings of Christ as distinct from those of later 
creeds or sects, should not have perceived, or should 
have ignored the circumstance that in the actual 
utterances of Christ there is not to be found one 
word, not one syllable, condemnatory of war between 
nation and nation, between State and State. The 
loci4s classicus, " All that take the sword," etc., is 
aimed at the impetuosity of the person addressed, 
or at its outmost range against civic revolt. It is 
only by wrenching the words from their context 
that it becomes possible to extend their application 
to the relations of one State to another. The or- 
ganic unity, named a State, is not identical with the 



142 WHAT IS WAR? 

units which compose it, nor is it a mere aggregate 
of those units. If there is a lesson which history 
enforces it is this lesson. And upon the laws 
w^hich regulate those unities named States, Christ 
nowhere breathes a word. The violence of faction 
or enthusiasm have indeed forced such decision from 
his utterances. Camille Desmoulins, in a moment 
of rash and unreasoning rhetoric, styled Him " le 
bon sans-culotte," and in the days of the Inter- 
nationale, IMichael Bakounine traced the beginnings 
of Nihilism to Galilee; just as in recent times the 
Anarchist, the Socialist have in His sanction sought 
the justification of their crimes or their fantasies. 
But in His whole teaching there is nothing that 
affects the politics of State and State. Ethics and 
metaphysics were outlined in His utterances, but 
not politics. His solitary reference to war as such 
contains no reprobation; a perverse ingenuity 
might even twist it into a maxim of prudence, a 
tacit assent to war. And the peace upon which 
Christ dwells in one great phrase after another is 
not the amity of States, but a profounder, a more 
intimate thing. It is the peace on which the Hebrew 
and the Arab poets insist, the peace which arises 
within the soul, ineffable, wondrous, from a sense 
of reconciliation, of harmony with the Divine, a 
peace which may, which does, exist on the battle- 
field as in the hermit's cell, in the fury of the onset 
as deep and tranquil as in the heart of him who 
rides alone in the desert beneath the midnight stars. 



CHRIST AND WAR 143 

Tolstoi's criticism here arises from his extension 
to the more complex and intricate unity of the State 
of the same laws which regulate the simpler unity 
of the individuals who compose the State. And 
of such a war as this in which Britain is now en- 
gaged, a war in its origin and course determined by 
that ideal which in these lectures I have sketched, a 
war whose end is the larger freedom, the higher 
justice, a war whose aim is not merely peace, but the 
full, the living development of those conditions of 
man's being without which peace is but an empty 
name, a war whose end is to deepen the life not 
only of the conquering, but of the conquered State 
— who shall assert, in the face of Christ's reserve, 
that such a war is contrary to the teachings of 
Galilee ? 

Finally, as the complement of this condemnation 
of war as the enemy of religion, men are exhorted, 
by the refusal of military service or other means, 
to strive as for the attainment of some fair vision 
towards the establishment of the empire of perpetual 
peace. The advent of this new era, it is announced, 
is at hand. 

§ 6. THE IDEAL OF UNIVERSAL PEACE 

Now the origins of this ideal are clear. It is 
ancient as life, and before man was, it was. It is 
the transference to the sphere of States of the deep- 
est instinctive yearning of all being, from the rock 
to the soul of man, the yearning towards peace, 



144 WHAT IS WAR? 

towards the rest, the immortal leisure which, to 
apply the phrase of Aristotle, the soul shall know in 
death, the deeper vision, the unending contempla- 
tion, the theoria of eternity. The error of its enthu- 
siasts, from Saint-Pierre and Vauvenargues to 
Herbart and Count Tolstoi, lies in the interpretation 
of this cosmic desire, deep as the wells of existence 
itself, and in the extension to the Conditioned of a 
phase of the Unconditioned. 

Will War then never cease ? Will universal peace 
be for ever but a dream? Upon this question a 
consideration of the ideal itself, of the forms in 
which at various epochs it has presented itself, and 
of the crises at which, appearing or reappearing, it 
most profoundly engages the imagination of a race, 
is instructive. 

In Hebrew history, for instance, it arises in the 
hour of defeat, in the consternation of a great race 
struck by irretrievable disaster. " How beautiful 
upon the mountains are the feet of him that bring- 
eth good tidings, that publisheth peace ! " In this 
and in other splendid pages of Isaiah we possess the 
first distinct enunciation of this ideal in world-his- 
tory, and with what a transforming radiance it is 
invested ! In what a majesty of light and insuffer- 
able glory it is uplifted! But it is a vision of the 
future, to be accomplished in ages undreamed of 
yet. It is the throb of the Hebrew soul beyond this 
earthly sphere and beyond this temporal dominion, 
to the immortal spheres of being, inviolate of Time. 



UNIVERSAL PEACE 145 

Yet even this vision, though co-terminous with the 
world, centres in Judaea — in the triumph of the 
Hebrew race and the overthrow of all its adversaries. 

Similarly, to Plato and to Isocrates, to Aristotle 
and to Aeschines, if peace is to be extended to all 
the earth " like a river," Hellas is the fountain from 
which it must flow. It is an imperial peace bounded 
by Hellenic civilisation, culture, laws. It is a peace 
forged upon war. Rome with her genius for ac- 
tuality discovers this. 

" Pray for the peace of Jerusalem : they shall 
prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls, 
and prosperity within thy palaces. For my breth- 
ren and companions' sakes, I will now say, * Peace 
be within thee.' " Substituting Hellas for Jerusa- 
lem, this is the prayer of a Greek of the age of 
Isocrates, of Cleanthes, and of Alexander. 

Rome by war ends war, and establishes the Pax 
Romana within her dominions, Spain, Gaul, Africa, 
Asia, Syria, Egypt. Disregarding the dying coun- 
sels of Augustus, Rome remains at truceless war 
with the world outside those limits. St. Just's proud 
resignation, " For the revolutionist there is no rest 
but the grave," is for ever true of those races dow- 
ered with the high and tragic doom of empire. 
To pause is disaster; to recede, destruction. Rome 
understood this, and her history is its great comment. 

To Islam the point at which she can bestow her 
peace upon men is not less clear, fixed by a power not 
less unalterable and high. Neither Haroun nor Al- 



146 WHAT IS WAR? 

Maimoun could, with all their authority and state- 
craft, stay the steep course of Islam; for the wisdom 
of a race is wiser than the wisdom of a man, and the 
sword which, In Abu Bekr's phrase, the Lord has 
drawn, Islam sheathes but on the Day of Judgment. 
Then and then only shall the Holy War end. 

The Peace of Islam, Shalom^ which is its designa- 
tion, is the serenity of soul of the warriors of God 
whose life is a warfare unending. And Virgil — 
in that early masterpiece, which in the Middle Age 
won for all his works the felicity or the misfortune 
attached to the suspicion of an inspiration other 
than Castalian, and drew to his grave pilgrims fired 
by an enthusiasm whose fountain was neither the 
ballad-burthen music of the Ge orgies, nor the meas- 
ureless pathos and pity for things human of the 
Aeneid — has sung the tranquil beauty of the Satur- 
nian age ; yet the peace which suggests his prophetic 
memory or hope is but the peace of Octavianus, 
the end of civil discord, of the proscriptions, the 
conflicts of Pharsalia, Philippi, Actium, a moment's 
respite to a war-fatigued world. 

Passing from the ancient world to the modem, 
we encounter in the Middle Age within Europe that 
which is known amongst mediaeval Latinists as the 
Treva or Treuga Dei. This " Truce of God " was 
a decree promulgated throughout Eurbpe for the 
cessation at certain sacred times of that feudal 
strife, that war of one noble against another which 
darkens our early history. It is the mediaeval equiv- 



UNIVERSAL PEACE 147 

alent of the Fajc Romana and is but dimly related 
to any ideal of Universal Peace. Hildebrand, who 
gave this Truce of God more support than any other 
Pope in the Middle Age, lights the fire of the cru- 
sades, giving to war one of the greatest consecra- 
tions that war has ever received. And the attitude 
of Mediaeval Europe towards the eternal peace is 
the attitude of Judsea, of Hellas, and of Rome.^* 

38 Nevertheless the Truce of God is one of the noblest ef- 
forts of mediaeval Europe. It drew its origins from southern 
France, arising partly from the misery of the people op- 
pressed by the constant and bloody strife of feudal princes and 
barons, heightened at that time by the fury of a pestilence, 
partly also from a widespread and often fixed and controlling 
persuasion that with the close of the century the thousand 
years of the Apocalypse would be fulfilled, and that with the 
year a. d. iooo the Day of Judgment would dawn. Ducange 
has collected the evidence bearing on the use of the Latin 
term, and Semichon's admirable work. La Paix et la Treve 
de Dieu, premiere edition, 1857, deuxieme edition revue et 
augmentee, 1869, sketches the growth of the movement. With 
the eleventh century, though the social misery is unaltered, 
the force of the mystic impulse is lost; at the synod of 
Tuluges in 1027 the days of the week on which the Truce 
must be observed are limited to two. But towards the close 
of the century the rising power of Hildebrand and the crusad- 
ing enthusiasm gave the movement new life, and the days 
during which all war was forbidden were extended to four 
of the seven days of the week, those sacred to the Last Supper, 
Death, Sepulture, and Resurrection. With the decline of the 
crusading spirit and the rise of monarchical principles the in- 
fluence and use of the Treuga waned. The verses of the 
troubadour, Bertrand le Born, are celebrated — " Peace is not 
for me, but war, war alone! What to me are Mondays and 
Tuesdays? And the weeks, months, and years, all are alike 
to me." The stanza fitly expresses the way in which the 



148 WHAT IS WAR? 

This is conspicuous in Saint Bernard, the last of the 
Fathers, and three centuries later in Pius II, the last 
of the crusading Pontiffs, the desire of whose life 
was to go even in his old age upon a crusade. This 
desire uplifts and bears him to his last resting-place 
in Ancona, where the old man, in his dying dreams, 
hears the tramp of legions that never came, sees upon 
the Adriatic the sails of galleys that were to bear the 
crusaders to Palestine — yet there were neither 
armies nor ships, it was but the fever of his dream. 
During the Reformation the ideal of Universal 
Peace is unregarded. The wars of religion, the 
world's debate, become the war of creeds. " I am 
not come to bring peace among you, but a sword." 
Luther, for instance, declares war against the re- 
volted peasants of Germany with all the ardour and 
fury with which Innocent III denounced war against 
the Albigenses. War in the language and thoughts 
of Calvin is what it became to Oliver Cromwell, 
to the Huguenots, and to the Scottish Covenanters, 
to Jean Chevallier and the insurgents of the Ce- 
vennes. As Luther in the sixteenth century repre- 
sents the religious side of the Reformation, so Gro- 
tius in the seventeenth century represents the position 
of the legists of the Reformation. In his work, De 
Jure Belli ac Pads, Universal Peace as an object of 
practical politics is altogether set aside. War is 
accepted as existent between nation and nation, State 

Truce had come to be regarded by feudal society towards the 
close of the twelfth century. 



UNIVERSAL PEACE 149 

and State, and Grotius lays down the laws which 
regulate it. Similar attempts had been made in the 
religious councils of Greece, and when the first great 
Saracen army was starting upon its conquests, the 
first of the Khali fs delivered to that army instruc- 
tions which in their humanity have never been sur- 
passed; the utmost observances of chivalry or mod- 
ern times are there anticipated. But the treatise of 
Grotius is the first elaboration of the subject in the 
method of his contemporary, Verulam — the method 
of the science of the future. 

In the eighteenth century the singular work of 
the mild and amiable enthusiast, the Abbe de Saint- 
Pierre,^^ made a profound impression upon the 
thought not only of his own but of succeeding gen- 
erations. Kings, princes, philosophers, sat in in- 
formal conference debating the same argument as 

39 St.-Pierre's work appeared in 1712, three years after Mal- 
plaquet, the most sanguinary struggle of the Marlborough 
wars. It is thus synchronous with the last gloomy years of 
Louis XIV, when France, and her king also, seemed sinking 
into the mortal lethargy of Jesuitism. St.-Simon in his early 
volumes has written the history of these years. Voltaire ac- 
cuses St.-Pierre of originating or encouraging the false im- 
pression that he had derived his theory from the Dauphin, 
the pupil of Fenelon and the Marcellus of the French Mon- 
archy. An English translation of St.-Pierre's treatise was 
published in 1714 with the following characteristic title-page: 
" A Project for settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe, first 
proposed by Henry IV of France, and approved of by Queen 
Elizabeth and most of the Princes of Europe, and now dis- 
cussed at large and made practicable by the Abbot St. Pierre 
of the French Academy." 



I50 WHAT IS WAR? 

has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague. 
It inspired some of the most earnest pages of 
D'Alembert and of the Encyclopedic. It drew from 
Voltaire some happy invective, affording the oppor- 
tunity of airing once more his well-loved but worth- 
less paradox on the trivial causes from which the 
great actions of history arise. Saint-Pierre's ideal 
informs the early chapters of Gibbon's History, but 
its influence disappears as the work advances. It 
charmed the fancy of Rousseau, and, by a curious 
irony, he inflamed by his impassioned argument that 
war for freedom which is to the undying glory of 
France.^® 

Frederick the Great in his extreme age wrote to 
Voltaire: "Running over the pages of history I 
see that ten years never pass without a war. This 
intermittent fever may have moments of respite, but 
cease, never! " This is the last word of the eight- 
eenth century upon the dream of Universal Peace — 
a word spoken by one of the greatest of kings, look- 
ing out with dying eyes upon a world about to close 

*" As late as 1791 we find Priestley looking to the French 
Revolution as the precursor of the era of Universal Peace. 
In a discourse delivered at "the Meeting House in the Old- 
Jewry, 27th April, 1791," he describes the " glorious enthusi- 
asm which has for its objects the flourishing of science and 
the extinction of wars." France, he declares, " has ensured 
peace to itself and to other nations at the same time, cutting 
off almost every possible cause of war," and enables us " to 
prognosticate the approach of the happy times in which the 
sure prophecies of Scripture inform us that wars shall cease 
and universal peace and harmony take place." 



UNIVERSAL PEACE 151 

in one of the deadliest yet most heroic and memor- 
able conflicts set down in the annals of our race. 
The Hundred Days are its epilogue — the war of 
twenty-five years ending in that great manner! 
Then, like a pallid dawn, the ideal once more arises. 
Congress after congress meets in ornamental debate, 
till six can be reckoned, or even seven, culminating 
in the recent conference at The Hague. Its derisive 
results, closing the debate of the nineteenth, as 
Frederick's words sum the debate of the eighteenth 
century, are too fresh in all men's memories to re- 
quire a syllable of comment. 

Thus then it appears from a glance at its history 
that this ideal of Universal Peace has stirred the 
imagination most deeply, first of all in the ages when 
an empire, whether Persian, Hebraic, Hellenic, or 
Roman conterminous with earth, wide as the in- 
habited world, was still in appearance realisable; 
or, again, in periods of defeat, or of civil strife, as in 
the closing age of the Roman oligarchy; or in the 
moments of exhaustion following upon long-con- 
tinued and desolating war, as in Modern Europe 
after the last phases of the Reformation conflict, 
the wars of Tilly and Wallenstein, of Marlborough 
and Eugene, and of Frederick. The familiar poetry 
in praise of peace, and the Utopias, the composition 
of which has amused the indolence of scholars or 
the leisure of statesmen, originate in such hours or 
in such moods. On the other hand, the criticism 
of war, scornful or ironic, of the great thinkers and 



152 WHAT IS WAR? 

speculative writers of modern times, when it is not 
merely the phantom of their logic, an eidolon specus 
created by their system, arises in the most impressive 
instances less from admiration or desire or hope of 
perpetual peace than from the arraignment of all 
life, and all the ideals, activities, and purposes of 
men. 

Hence the question whether war be a permanent 
condition of human life is answered by implication. 
For the history of the ideal of Universal Peace but 
re-enforces that definition of war set forth above, as 
a manifestation of the world-spirit, co-extensive 
with being, and as such, inseparable from man's 
life here and now. In all these great wars which we 
have touched upon, the conflict of two ideas, in 
the Platonic sense of the word, unveils itself, but 
both ideas are ultimately phases of one Idea. It is 
by conflict alone that life realises itself. That is 
the be-all and end-all of life as such, of Being as 
such. From the least developed forms of struc- 
tural or organic nature to the highest form in which 
the world-force realises itself, the will and imagina- 
tion of Man, this law is absolute. The very magic 
of the stars, their influence upon the human heart, 
derives somethilng of its potency, one sometimes 
fancies, from the vast, the silent, mighty strife, the 
victorious energy, which brings their rays across 
the abysses and orbits of the worlds. 

What is the art of Hellas but the conquest of the 
rock, the marble, and the fixing there in perennial 



UNIVERSAL PEACE 153 

beauty, perennial calm, the thought bom from the 
travail of the sculptors brain, or from the unre- 
corded struggle of dark forces in the past, which 
emerge now in a vision of transcendent rapture and 
light ? By this conflict, multiplex or simple, the con- 
quering energy of the form, the defeated energy of 
the material, the serenity of the statues of Phidias, 
of the tragedies of Sophocles, is attained. They are 
the symbol, the visible embodiment of the moment 
of deepest vision, and of the deepest agony now at 
rest there, a loveliness for ever. And as the seons 
recede, as the intensity of the idea of the Divine 
within man increases, so does this conflict, this 
agonia increase. It is in the heart of the tempest 
that the deepest peace dwells. 

The power, the place of conflict, thus great in Art, 
is in the region of emotional, of intellectual and of 
moral life, admittedly supreme. Doubt, contrition 
of soul, and the other modes of spiritual agonia, are 
not these equivalent with the life, not death, of the 
soul? 

And those moments of serenest peace, when the 
desire of the heart is one with the desire of the 
world-soul, are not these attained by conflict? In 
the life of the State, the soul of the State, as com- 
posed of such monads, such constituent forms and 
organic elements, each penetrated and impelled by 
the divine, self-realising, omnipresent nisus, how 
vain to hope, to desire, to pray, that there this 
mystic all-pervading Force, this onward-striving, 



154 WHAT IS WAR? 

this conflict, which is as it were the very essence and 
necessary law of being, should pause and have an 
end ! War may change its shape, the struggle here 
intensifying, there abating it; it may be uplifted by 
ever loftier purposes and nobler causes — but cease? 
How shall it cease? 

Indeed, in the light of History, universal peace 
appears less as a dream than as a nightmare which 
shall be realised only when the ice has crept to the 
heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and track- 
less, start from their orbits, 

§ 7. IMPERIALISM AND WAR 

If war then be a permanent factor in the life of 
States, how, it may be asked, will it be affected by 
Imperialism and by such an ideal as this of Imperial 
Britain? The effects upon war, will, I should say, 
be somewhat of this nature. It will greaten and ex- 
alt the character of war. Not only in constitutional, 
but in foreign politics, the roots of the present lie 
deep in the past. In the wars of an imperial State 
the ideals of all the wars of the past still live, adding 
a fuller life to the life of the present. From the 
earliest tribal forays, slowly broadening through the 
struggles of feudalism and Plantagenet kings to 
the wars of the nation, one creative purpose, one 
informing principle links century to century, devel- 
oping itself at last in the wars of empire, wars for 
the larger freedom, the higher justice. And this 
ideal differs from the ideal of primitive times as the 



IMPERIALISM AND WAR 155 

vast complexity of races, peoples, religions, climates, 
traditions, litera4;ures, arts, manners, laws, which the 
word " Britain " now conceals, differs from the 
' companies ' and * hundreds ' of daring warriors 
who followed the fortunes of a Cerdic or an Uffa. 
For the State which by conquest or submission is 
merged in the life of another State does not thereby 
evade that law of conflict of which I have spoken, 
but becomes subject to that law in the life of the 
greater State, national or imperial, of which it now 
forms a constituent and organic part. And looming 
already on the horizon, the wars of races rise porten- 
tous, which will touch to purposes yet higher and 
more mystic the wars of empires — as these have 
greatened the wars of nationalities, these again the 
wars of feudal kings, of principalities, of cities, of 
tribes or clans. 

Secondly, this ideal of Imperial Britain will 
greaten and exalt the action of the soldier, hallowing 
the death on the battlefield with the attributes at 
once of the hero and the martyr. Thus, when 
M. Bloch and similar writers delineate war as robbed 
by modern inventions of its pomp and circumstance, 
when they expatiate upon the isolation resulting 
from a battle-line extended across leagues, and upon 
the " zone of death " separating the opposing hosts, 
one asks in perplexity, to what end does M. Bloch 
consider that war was waged in the past ? For the 
sake of such emotional excitement or parade as are 
now by smokeless powder, maxims, long-range 



156 WHAT IS WAR? 

rifles, and machine guns abolished? These are 
but the trappings, the outward vesture of war; the 
cause, the sacred cause, is by this transformation 
in the methods of war all untouched. Was there 
then no " zone of death " between the armies at 
Eylau or at Gravelotte ? Let but the cause be high, 
and men will find means to cross that zone, now as 
then — by the sapper's art if by no other ! And as 
the pride and ostentation of battle are effaced, its 
inner glory and dread sanctity are the more evinced. 
The battlefield is an altar; the sacrifice the most 
awful that the human eye can contemplate or the 
imagination with all its efforts invent. " The 
drum," says a French moralist, " is the music of 
battle, because it deadens thought." But in modern 
warfare the faculties are awake. Solitude is the 
touchstone of valour, and the modern soldier cast 
in upon himself, undazzled, unblinded, faces death 
singly. Fighting for ideal ends, he dies for men 
and things that are not yet; he dies, knowing in 
his heart that they may never be at all. Courage 
and self-renunciation have attained their height. 

Nor have strategy and the mechanical appliances 
of modern warfare turned the soldier into a machine, 
an automaton, devoid of will and self-directing en- 
ergy. Contemporary history makes it daily clearer 
that in modern battles brain and nerve count as 
heavily as they ever did in the combats by the 
Scamander or the Simois. Another genius, and an- 
other epic style than those of Homer may be requi- 



IMPERIALISM AND WAR 157 

site fitly to celebrate them, but the theme assuredly 
is not less lofty, the heroism less heroic, the triumph 
or defeat less impressive. 

Twice, and twice only, is man inevitably alone — 
in the hour of death and the hour of his birth. 
Man, alone always, is then supremely alone. In 
that final solitude what are pomp and circumstance 
to the heart? That which strengthens a man then, 
whether on the battlefield or at the stake or in life's 
unrecorded martyrdoms, is not the cry of present 
onlookers nor the hope of remembering fame, but 
the faith for which he has striven, or his conception 
of the purposes, the ends in which the nation for 
which he is dying, lives and moves and has its being. 
Made strong by this, he endures the ordeal, the 
hazard of death, in the full splendour of the war, 
or at its sullen, dragging close, or in the battle's 
onset, or on patrol, the test of the dauntless, surren- 
dering the sight of the sun, the coming of spring, and 
all that the arts and various wisdom of the centuries 
have added of charm or depth to nature's day. And 
in the great hour, whatever his past hours have 
been, consecrate to duty or to ease, to the loftiest 
or to the least-erected aims, whether he is borne on 
triumphant to the dread pause, the vigil which is 
the night after a battle, or falling he sinks by a fatal 
touch, and the noise of victory is hushed in the com- 
ing of the great silence, and the darkness swoons 
around him, and the cry " Press on ! " stirs no 
pulsation any longer — in that great hour he is 



I5'8 WHAT IS WAR? 

lifted to the heights of the highest, the prophet's 
rapt vision, the poet's moment of serenest inspira- 
tion, or what else magnifies or makes approximate 
to the Divine this mortal life of ours. 

War thus greatened in character by its ideal, the 
phrase of the Greek orator, let me repeat, is no 
longer an empty sound, but vibrates with its original 
life — " How fortunate the dead who have fallen in 
battle ! And how fortunate are you to whom sor- 
row comes in so glorious a shape ! " An added 
solemnity invests the resolutions of senates, and 
the prayer on the battlefield, " Through death to 
life," acquires a sincerity more moving and a sim- 
plicity more heroic. And these, I imagine, will be 
the results of Imperialism and of this deepening 
consciousness of its destiny in Imperial Britain, 
whether in war which is the act of the State as a 
whole, or in the career of the soldier which receives 
its consummation there in the death on the battle- 
field. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES 

Having considered in the first lecture a definition 
of Imperialism, and traced in the second and third 
the development in religion and in politics of the 
ideal of Imperial Britain, and having afterwards 
examined the relations of this ideal to the supreme 
questions of War and Peace, an inquiry not less 
momentous, but from its intangible and even mystic 
character less capable of definite resolution, now de- 
mands attention. How is this ideal of the Imper- 
ialistic State related to that from which all States 
originally derive ? How is it related to the Divine ? 
From the consideration of this problem two others 
arise, that of the vicissitudes of States and Empires, 
and that of the destiny of this Empire of Imperial 
Britain. 

From the analogy of the Past is it possible to 
apprehend even dimly the curve which this Empire, 
moved by a new ideal, and impelled by the deepening 
consciousness of its destiny, will describe amongst 
the nations and the peoples of the earth? 

Empire, we have seen, is the highest expression 
of the soul of the State; it is the complete, the final 
consummation of the life of the State. But the 

159 



i6o STATES AND EMPIRES 

State, the soul of the State, is in itself but a unity 
that is created from the units, the individuals which 
compose it. Nevertheless the unity of the State 
which results from those units is not the same unity, 
nor is it subject to, or governed by, the same laws 
as regulate the life of the individual. Not only the 
arraignment of the maxims of statesmen as immoral, 
but the theories, fantastic or profound, of the rise 
and fall of States, are marred or rendered idle ut- 
terly by the initial confusion of the organic unity 
of the State with the unity of the individual. But 
though no composite unity is governed by the same 
laws as govern its constituent atoms, nevertheless 
that unity must partake of the nature of its con- 
stituent atoms, change as they change, mutually 
transforming and transformed. So is this unity of 
the State influenced by the units which compose it, 
which are the souls of men. 

§ I. THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE 

Consider then, first of all, in relation to the con- 
sciousness which is the attribute of the life of the 
State, the consciousness which is the soul of man. 
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we have 
seen, the saintly ideal which had hitherto controlled 
man's life dies to the higher thought of Europe. 
The saint gives place to the crusader and scholastic, 
and the imagination of the time acknowledges the 
spell of oriental paganism and oriental culture. 

Certain of the most remarkable minds of that 



ORIGIN OF THE STATE i6i 

epoch, men like Berengarius of Tours, for instance, 
or St. Victor, and Amalrich, are profoundly troubled 
by a problem of the following nature. How shall 
the justice of God be reconciled with the destiny He 
assigns to the souls of men? They are sent forth 
from their rest in the Divine to dwell in habitations 
of mortal flesh, incurring reprobation and exile ever- 
lasting, or after a season returning, according as 
they are appointed to a life dark to the sacrifice on 
Calvary, or to a life by that Blood redeemed. By 
what law or criterion of right does God send forth 
those souls, emanations of His divinity, to a doom 
of misery or bliss, according as they are attached to 
a body north of the Mediterranean, or southward 
of that sea, within the sway of the falsest of false 
prophets, Mohammed? This trouble in the heart 
of the eleventh century arose from the insight which 
compassion gives; the European imagination, at 
rest with regard to its own safety, is for the first 
time perplexed by the fate of men of an alien race 
and faith, whose heroism it has nevertheless learnt 
to revere, as in after-times it was perplexed in pon- 
dering the fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and 
thought it vainly strove to imitate. Underlying this 
trouble in their hearts is the assumption to which 
Plato and certain of his sect have leanings, that 
within the Divine there is as it were a treasury of 
souls from which individual essences are sped hither, 
to dwell within each mortal body immediately on its 
birth. 



i62 STATES AND EMPIRES 

Now in an earlier age than the age of Berengarius 
and St. Victor, there arose within Alexandria one 
whose thought in its range, in the sweep of its orbit, 
was perhaps the widest and most distant amongst 
the children of men. In the most remarkable and 
sublime of his six Enneads, another theory upon the 
same subject occurs.^ ^ The fate of the soul in pass- 
ing from its home with the Everlasting is like the 
fate of a child which in infancy has been removed 
from its parents and reared in a foreign land. The 
child forgets its country and its kindred as the soul 
forgets in the joy of its freedom the felicity it knew 
when one with the Divine. But after the lapse of 
years if the child return amongst its kindred, at first 
indeed it shall not know them, but now a word, now 
a gesture, or again a trick of the hand, a cadence 
of the voice, will come to it like the murmur of for- 
gotten seas by whose shores it once had dwelt, awak- 
ing within it strange memories, and gradually by 
the accumulation of these the truth will at last flash 
in upon the child — " Behold my father and my 
brethren!" So the soul of man, though knowing 
not whence it came, is by the teachings of Divine 
wisdom, and by inspired thinkers, quickened to a 
remembrance of its heavenly origin, and its life 
henceforth becomes an ever-increasing, ever more 
vivid memory of the tranced peace, the bliss that 
it knew there within the Everlasting. 

41 See Volkmann's edition of Plotinus, the sole attempt at a 
critical text worthy of the name that has yet been made. 



ORIGIN OF THE STATE 163 

Let me attempt to apply this thought of the 
Egyptian mystic to the problem before us. Disre- 
garding the theory of an infinite series of successive 
incarnations from the inexhaustible treasury of the 
Divine, permit me to recall the observations made 
in an earlier lecture on the contrast between the 
limited range of man's consciousness, and the meas- 
ureless past stretching behind him, the infinite spaces 
around him. 

Judged by the perfect ideal of knowledge, the uni- 
verse is necessary to the understanding of a flower, 
and the dateless past to the intelligence of the his- 
tory of a day. But as the beam of light never severs 
itself from its fountain, as the faintest ray that falls 
within the caverns of the sea remains united with 
the orb whence it sprang, so the soul of man has 
grown old along with nature, and acquainted from 
its foundations with the fabric of the universe. 

Therefore when it confronts some simple object 
of sense or emotion, or the more intricate move- 
ments and events of history, or the rushing storm 
of the present, the soul has about it strange inti- 
macies, it has within it preparations drawn from 
that fellowship with nature throughout the aeons, 
the abysses of Eternity. And as the aeons advance, 
the soul grows ever more conscious of the end of all 
its striving, and its serenity deepens as the certainty 
of the ultimate attainment of that end increases. 

Baulked of its knowledge of an hour by its igno- 
rance of Eternity, it attains its rest in the Infinite, 



i64 STATES AND EMPIRES 

which seeking it shall find, piercing through every 
moment of the transient to the Eternal. What are 
the spaces and the labyrinthian dance of the worlds 
to the soul which is ever more profoundly absorbed, 
remembering, knowing, or in vision made prescient 
of its identity with the soul of the universe? And 
as the ages recede, the immanence of the Divine be- 
comes more consciously, more pervadingly present. 
Earth deepens in mystery; premonitions of its des- 
tiny visit the soul, falling manifold as the shadows 
of twilight, or in mysterious tones far-borne and 
deep as the chords struck by the sweeping orbs in 
space. 

The soul thus neglects the finite save as an avenue 
to the infinite, and holds knowledge in light esteem 
unless as a path to the wonder, the ecstasy, and the 
wisdom which are beyond knowledge. The past is 
dead, the present is a dream, the future is not yet, 
but in the Eternal now the soul is one with that 
Reality of which the remotest pasts, the farthest 
presents, the most distant futures, are but changing 
phases. 

If then we regard the soul, its origin and its des- 
tiny, in this manner, what a wonder of light in- 
vests its history within Time! Banished from its 
primal abode beyond the crystal walls of space, with 
what achievements has not the exile graced the earth, 
its habitation! Wondrous indeed is man's course 
across the earth, and with what shall the works of 
his soul be compared? From those first uncer- 



ORIGIN OF THE STATE 165 

tainties, those faltering elations, the Vision, dimly 
discerned as yet, lures him with tremulous ecstasies 
to eternise the fleeting, and in columned enclosure 
and fretted canopy to uprear an image which he can 
control of the arch of heaven and the unsustained 
architecture of the stars. These outreach his mortal 
grasp, outwearying his scrutiny, blinding his intelli- 
gence; but, master of the image, his soul knows 
again by reflection the felicity which it knew when 
one with the Shaper of the worlds. 

And thu's the soul mounts, steep above steep, from 
the rudely hewn granite to the breathing marbles of 
the Parthenon, to the hues of Titian, to the forests 
in stone, the domes and minarets, and the gemmed 
splendour of later races, to the drifted snows of the 
Taj -Mahal, iridescent with diamond and pearl. 

Yea, from those first imaginings, caught from the 
brooding rocks, and moulded in the substance of 
the rocks, still it climbs, instructed by the winds, 
the ocean's tidal rhythm, and the tumultuous trans- 
ports of the human voice, its raptures, sorrows, or 
despairs, to the newer wonder, the numbered 
cadences of poetry, the verse of Homer, Sophocles, 
and Shakespeare. 

And at the last, lessoned by those ancient instruc- 
tors, winds and tides, and the ever-moving spheres 
of heaven, how does the soul attain its glory, and 
in Music, the art of arts, the form of forms, poise 
on the starry battlements of God's dread sanctuary, 
tranced in prayer, in wonder ineffable, at the long 



i66 STATES AND EMPIRES 

pilgrimage accomplished at last — in the adagio of 
the great Concerto, in the Requiem, or those later 
strains of transhuman sadness and serenity trans- 
human, in which the soul hears again the song sung 
by the first star that ever left the shaping hands of 
God and took its way alone through the lonely 
spaces, pursuing an untried path across the dark, 
the silent abysses — how dark, how silent ! — a mov- 
ing harmony, foreboding even then in its first sepa- 
rate delight and sorrow of estrangement all the an- 
guish and all the ecstasy that the unborn universes of 
which it is the herald and precursor yet shall know ! 

Aristotle indeed affirms that in the universe there 
are many things more excellent than man, the 
planets, for instance. He is thinking of the mighty 
yet perfect curve which they describe, though with 
all the keenness of his analytic perception, he is in 
this judgment not unaffected by the fancy, current 
in his time, that those planets are living things each 
with its attendant soul, which shapes its orbit and 
that fixed path athwart the night. How much 
higher a will that steadfast motion argues than the 
wavering purposes, the unstable desires of human 
life. But we know that the planet with all its 
mighty curve is but as the stage to the piece enacted 
thereon ; it is the moving theatre on which the drama 
of life, from its first dark unconscious motions to the 
freest energy of the soul in its airy imaginings, is 
accomplished. And the thought of Pascal which 
might be a rejoinder to this of Aristotle is well 



EMPIRES AND ART 167 

known, that though the universe rise up against man 
to destroy him, yet man is greater than the uni- 
verse, because he knows that he dies, but of its 
power to destroy the universe knows nothing. 

If this then be the origin of the individual soul, 
and if its recorded and unrecorded history and action 
in the universe be of this height, it is not astonish- 
ing that the laws and operations of the soul of the 
State, which is of an order yet more complex and 
mysterious, should baffle investigation, and foil the 
most assiduous efforts to reduce them to a system, 
and compel speculation to have recourse to such 
false analogies and misleading resemblances as those 
to which reference has in these lectures more than 
once been made. 

§ 2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART 

Thus we trace the unity of the State to the unity 
of the individual soul, and thence to the Divine 
unity. The soul of the State is the higher, the more 
complex unity, and it is not merely in the actions 
of the individual in relation to or as an organic part 
of the State that we must seek for the entire influ- 
ence of the State upon individual life, or for the per- 
fect expression of the abstract energy of the State 
in itself and by itself. Man in such relations does 
often merit the reprobation of Rousseau, and his 
theory of the deteriorating effects of a complex 
unity upon the single unity of the individual soul 
seems often to find justification. Similarly, the ex- 



i68 STATES AND EMPIRES 

elusive admiration of many unwitting disciples of 
Rousseau for the deeds of the individual as opposed 
to the deeds of the State, for art as opposed to poli- 
tics, discovers in a first study of these relations 
strong support. But the artist is not isolated and 
self-dependent. If the supreme act of a race is war, 
if its supreme thought is its religion, and its su- 
preme poems, its language — deeds, thoughts, and 
poems to which the whole race has contributed — so 
in manifold, potent, if unperceived ways the State 
affects those energisings in art and thought which 
seem most independent of the State. The sen- 
tence of Aristotle is familiar, " The solitary man is 
either a brute or a god," but the solitariness whether 
of the Thebaid or of Fonte Avellano, of Romualdo, 
Damiani, or of that Yogi, who, to exhibit his hate 
and scorn of life, flung himself into the flames in 
the presence of Alexander, is yet indebted and 
bound by ties invisible, mystic, innumerable, to the 
State, to the race, for the structural design of the 
soul itself, for that very pride, that isolating power 
which seems most to sever it from the State. *^ And 
who shall determine the limits of the unconscious 

*2 Spinoza's answer to the " melancholici qui laudant vitam 
incultem et agrestem" (iv Prop. 35, note), that men can pro- 
vide for their needs better by society than by solitude, hardly 
meets the higher criticism of the State. Yet it anticipates 
Fichte's retort to Rousseau. Spinoza, if this were written 
circa 1665, has in view, perhaps, the Trappists, then reorgan- 
ised by Bossuet's friend, and perhaps also Port Royal aux 
Champs. 



EMPIRES AND ART 169 

life which in that lonely contemplation or that lone- 
lier scorn, the soul receives from the State? For 
from the same source the component and the com- 
posite, the constituent and the constituted unity alike 
arise, and the Immanence that is in each is One. 
" Whither shall I go from Thy spirit ? or whither 
shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into 
heaven, Thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, 
behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the 
morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the 
sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy 
right hand shall hold me. If I say. Surely the dark- 
ness shall cover me; even the night shall be light 
about me. Yea, the darkness liideth not from 
Thee; but the night shineth as the day; the dark- 
ness and the light are both alike to Thee." 

The everday topic which makes man " the crea- 
ture of his time " derives whatever truth it pos- 
sesses from this unity, but Sophocles did not write 
the Ajax because Miltiades fought at Marathon, nor 
Tirso, El Condennado because Cortez defeated 
Montezuma. Whatever law connect greatness in 
art and greatness in action, it is not the law of cause 
and effect, of necessary succession in time. They 
are the mutually dependent manifestations of the 
same immortal energy which uplifts the whole State, 
whose motions arise from beyond Time, the roots of 
whose being are beyond the region of cause and ef- 
fect. 

Consider now as an illustration of the inter-de- 



I70 STATES AND EMPIRES 

pendence of the soul of the individual and of the 
State, and of the immanence in each of the Divine, 
the relation which world-history reveals as existing 
between the higher manifestations of the life of the 
individual and of the State. The greatest achieve- 
ments of individual men, whether in action, or in 
art, or in thought, are, it will generally be found, 
coincident with, and synchronous with, the highest 
form which in its development the State assumes, 
that is, with some form or mode of empire. For it 
is not merely the art of Phidias, of Sophocles, that 
springs from the energy aroused by the Persian 
invasions; the energy which finds expression in the 
Empire of Athens is to be traced thither, empire and 
art arising from the same exaltation of the State 
and of the individual. But they are not related as 
cause and effect, nor is the art of Sophocles caused 
by Marathon ; but the Agamemnon and Salamis, the 
Parthenon and the Ajax, are incarnations in words, 
in deeds, or in marble of the divine Idea immanent 
in the whole race of the Hellenes. A race capable 
of empire, the civic form of imperiahsm, thus arises 
simultaneously with its greatest achievements in art. 
Similarly in the civic State of mediaeval Florence, 
the age of Leonardo and of Savonarola is also the 
age of Lorenzo, when in politics Florence competes 
with Venice and the Borgias for the hegemony of 
Italy, and the actual bounds of her civic empire are 
at their widest. So in Venetian history empire and 
art reach their height together, and the age which 



EMPIRES AND ART 171 

succeeds that of Giorgione and of Titian is an end 
not only to the painting but to the political greatness 
of Venice. 

As in civic so in national empires. In Spain, 
Charles V and the Philips are the tyrants of the 
greatest single military power and of the first na- 
tion of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas 
and Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and 
Velasquez. Racine and Moliere serve le grand 
Monarque, as Apelles served Alexander. The mari- 
ners who sketched the bounds of this empire, which 
is at last attaining to the full consciousness of its 
mighty destinies, were the contemporaries of Mar- 
lowe and Webster, of Beaumont and Ford. 

Napoleon's fretful impatience that his victories 
should have as their literary accompaniments only 
the wan tragedies of Joseph Chenier and the un- 
leavened odes of Millevoye was just. An empire so 
glorious, if based on the people's will, should not 
have found in the genius of the age its sworn antag- 
onist. This stamped his empire as spurious. 

But these simultaneous phenomena, these supreme 
attainments at once in action and in art, are not 
connected as cause and effect. For the roots of their 
identity we must search deeper. The transcendent 
deed and the work of art alike have their origin in 
the elan of the soul, the diviner vision or the diviner 
desire. The will which becomes the deed, the vision 
which becomes the poem or the picture, are here as 
yet one ; and this elan, this energy of the soul, what 



172 STATES AND EMPIRES 

is it but the energy of the infinite within the finite, 
of the eternal within time ? Art in whatever perfec- 
tion it attains is but an illustration, imperfect, of the 
spirit of man. The greatest books that ever were 
written, the most exquisite sculptures that ever were 
carved, the most delicate temples that ever were 
reared, the richest paintings that ever came from 
Titian are all in themselves ultimately but the dust 
of the soul of him who composes them, builds them, 
carves them. The unrevealed and the unrevealable 
is the soul itself that in such works is dimly adum- 
brated. The most perfect statue is but an imperfect 
semblance of the beauty which the sculptor beheld, 
though intensifying and reacting upon, and even in a 
sense consummating, that inward vision; and the 
sublimest energy of imperial Rome derives its tragic 
height from the degree to which it realises the 
energy of the race. 

In the Islam of Omar this law displays itself su- 
premely, and with a flame-like vividness. There the 
divine origin of the State which in the Athens of 
Pericles is hidden or revealed in the myriad forms 
of art, plastic or poetic, in the Rome of Sulla or 
Caesar in tragic action, displays itself in naked purity 
and in majesty unadorned. If artistic loveliness 
marks the age of Sophocles, tragic grandeur the 
Rome of Augustus, mystic sublimity is the feature 
of the Islam of Omar. The thought and the deed, 
Xoyos Kol TTotrjais, here are one. 



THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION 173 

§ 3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES : THE THEORY OF 
RETRIBUTION 

We have now reached the final stage of our in- 
quiry. Is there any law by which the vicissitudes of 
the States, whose origin has been traced through 
the individual to a remoter and more awful source, 
are fixed' and directed ? And can the decay of em- 
pires, those supreme forms in the development of 
States, be resolved into its determining causes, or 
do we here confront a movement which is beyond 
the sphere ruled by cause and effect? 

In Western Europe a broken arch and some frag- 
ments of stone are often all that mark the place 
where stood some perfect achievement of mediaeval 
architecture, a feudal stronghold or an abbey. But 
on the lower plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, a 
ruin hardly more conspicuous may denote the seat of 
an empire. Such a region, fronting the desert, 
formed a fit theatre for man's first speculations upon 
his own destiny and that of the nations. Those two 
inquiries have proceeded together. His vision of 
the universe, original or accepted, inevitably shapes 
and transforms the poet's, the prophet's, or the his- 
torian's vision of any portion of that universe, how- 
ever limited in time and space. 

Hebrew literature, affected by the revolutions of 
Assyria, Chaldsea, Media, and Egypt, already dis- 
closes two theories which, modified or applied, mould 
man's thought when bent to this problem down to 



174 STATES AND EMPIRES 

the present hour. Round one or other of these 
conceptions the speculations of over two thousand 
years naturally group themselves. 

The first of these theories, which may be styled 
the Theory of Retribution, attributes the decay of 
empires to the visitation of a divine vengeance. 
The fall of an empire is the punishment of sin and 
of wrong doing. The pride and iniquity of the few, 
or the corruption and ethical degeneration of the 
mass, involves the ruin of the State. Regardless of 
the contradictions to this law in the life of the indi- 
vidual, its supremacy in the life of empires has 
throughout man's history been decreed and pro- 
claimed. Hebrew thought was perplexed and 
amazed from the remotest periods at the felicity of 
the oppressor and the unjust man, and the misery of 
the good. But the sublime and inspired rhetoric 
of Isaiah rests upon the assumption that the punish- 
ment of wrong, uncertain amongst men, is sure 
amongst nations and States. 

In a more ethical form this conception is easily 
traced throughout Greek and Roman thought. In 
St. Augustine it reappears in its original shape, and 
invested with the dignity, the fulness, and the pre- 
cision of an historical argument. A Roman by 
birth, culture, and youthful sympathies, loving the 
sad cadences of Virgil like a passion, admitted by 
Cicero to an intimacy with Hellenic thought, he is, 
later in life, attracted, fascinated, and finally sub- 
dued by the ideal of the Nazarene, and by the poetry 



THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION 175 

and history behind it. He sees Rome fall; and 
what the fate of Babylon was to the Hebrew prophet 
the fate of Rome becomes to Augustinus — the sym- 
bol of divine wrath, the punishment of her pride, her 
idolatry, and her sin. Rome falls as Babylon, as 
Assyria fell ; but in the De Civitate, to which he de- 
votes some fifteen years of his life, is delineated the 
city which shall not pass away.^^ The destruction 
of Rome, limited in time and space, coalesces with 
the wider thought of the Stoics, the destruction of 
the world. 

So to the Middle Age the fall of Rome was but 
an argument for the theme of the passing away of 
earth itself and all earthly things like a scroll. Be- 
fore its imagination, as along a highroad, moved a 
procession of empires — Assyria, Media, Babylon, 

^3 The writings of St. Augustine by their extraordinary vari- 
ety, vast intellectual range, and the impression of a distinct 
personal utterance which flows from every page at which they 
are opened, exercise upon the imagination an effect like that 
which the works of Diderot or Goethe alone of moderns have 
the power to reproduce. The De Civitate is his greatest and 
most sustained effort, and though controversial in intention 
it reaches again and again an epic sublimity both in imagery 
and diction. The peoples and empires of the world are the 
heroes, and the part which Augustine assigns to the God of 
all the earth has cuiyous reminiscences of the parts played by 
the deities in pagan poetry. Over the style the influence of 
Virgil is supreme. Criticism indeed offers few more alluring 
tasks than the attempt to gauge the comparative effects of the 
Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the men of after times 
who loved them most — Tacitus and St. Augustine, Dante, 
Racine, and Flaubert. 



176 STATES AND EMPIRES 

Greece, Rome, Persia, and at the last, as a shadowy 
dream of all these, the Empire of Charlemagne and 
of the Othos. Their successive falls point to man's 
obstinacy in sin, and the recurrence of the event to 
the nearness of the Judgment. 

The treatises of Damiani, Otho of Freisingen,*^ 
and of the Cardinal Lothar, formulate the argu- 
ment, and as late as the seventeenth century Bossuet 
dedicates to this same theme an eloquence not less 
impressive and finished than that of Augustine him- 
self. In recent times this theory influences strongly 
the historical conceptions of Ruskin and Carlyle. 
It is the informing thought of Ruskin's greatest 
work, The Stones of Venice. The value of that 
work is imperishable, because the documents upon 
which it is based are by the wasting force of wind 
and sun and sea daily passing beyond scrutiny or 
comparison. Yet its philosophy is but an echo of 
the philosophy of Carlyle' s second period, and as 

4* The World-History of Otho of Freisingen was modelled 
upon the De Civitate of St. Augustine. He styles it the 
" Book of the Two Cities," i.e., Babylon and Jerusalem, and 
sketches from the mediaeval standpoint the course of human 
life from the origin of the world to the year a. d. 1146. His 
work on the Apocalypse and his impression of the Last Judg- 
ment are a fitting close to the whole. He is uncritical in the 
use of his materials, but conveys a distinct impression of his 
habits of thought; and something of the brooding calm of a 
mediseval monastery invests the work. In the following year 
he started on the crusade of Konrad III, his half-brother; but 
returning in safety, wrote his admirable annals of the early 
deeds of the hero of the age, the emperor Barbarossa. 



THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION 177 

ever, the disciple exaggerates the teachings of the 
master. The bent of Carlyle's genius was nearer 
that of Rousseau than he ever permitted himself 
to imagine. In the Cromwelliad Carlyle elaborates 
the fancy that the one great and heroic period of 
English history is that of Cromwell, and that in a 
return to the principles of that era lies the salvation 
of England. Similarly Ruskin allots to Venice its 
great and heroic period, ascribing that greatness to 
the fidelity of the people of Venice to the standard 
of St. Mark and the ideal of Christianism of which 
that standard was the emblem. But in the six- 
teenth century Venice swerved from this ideal, and 
her fall is the consequence. 

In all such speculations a method has been applied 
to the State identical with that indicated in the sec- 
ond chapter. They exhibit the effort of the human 
mind to discover in the universe the evolution of a 
design in harmony with its own conception of what 
individual life is or ought to be. Genius, beauty, 
virtue, the breast consecrated to lofty aims, are still 
the dearest target to disaster, and to the blind as- 
saults of fate and man. In individual life, there- 
fore, the primitive conception has been modified, 
but in the wider and more intricate life of a State 
the endless variety of incidents, characters, fortunes, 
the succession of centuries, and of modes of thought, 
literatures, arts, creeds, the revolutions in political 
ideals, offer so complex a mass of phenomena that 
the breakdown of the theory, patent at once in the 



178 STATES AND EMPIRES 

narrower sphere of obsen^ation, is here obscured 
and shielded from detection. Man's intellect is 
easily the dupe of the heart's desire, and in the brief 
span of human life willingly carries a fiction to the 
grave. And he who defends a pleasing dream is 
necessarily honoured amongst men more than the 
visionary whose course is towards the glacier heights 
and the ic}'- solitudes of thought. 

§ 4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES : THE CYCLIC THEORY 

The second theoi-y is that of a cycle in human 
affairs, which controls the rise and fall of empires 
by a law similar to that of the seasons and the 
revolutions of the heavenly bodies. This theory 
varies little; the metaphors, the figures by which 
it is darkened or made clearer change, but the essen- 
tial idea remains one in the great myth of Plato or 
in the Indian epics, in the rigid steel-clasped system 
of Vico, or in the sentimental musings of Volney. 
The vicissitudes are no more determined by the neg- 
lect or performance of religious rites or certain 
ethical rules. Man's life is regarded as part of the 
universal scheme of things, and the fate of empires 
as subject to natural laws. The mode in which this 
theory originates thus connects itself at once with 
the mode of the Chaldsean astrology and modern 
evolution. 

It appears late in the development of Hebrew 
thought, and finds its most remarkable expression 
in the fragment, the writer of which is now not un- 



THE CYCLIC THEORY 179 

frequently spoken of as " Khoeleth." ^^ " One gen- 
eration passeth away and another generation 
Cometh ; but the earth abideth for ever. The sun 
also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to 
his place, where he arose. The wind goeth towards 
the south and turneth about unto the north, it 
whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth 
again according to his circuits. The thing that hath 
been, it is that which shall be; and that which is 
done, is that which shall be done, and there is no 
new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof 
it may be said. See, this is new ? it hath been already 
of old time, which was before us. There is no re- 
membrance of former things ; neither shall there be 
any remembrance of things that are to come with 
those that shall come after," 

The writings of Machiavelli reveal a mind based 
on the same deeps as Khoeleth, brooding on the 
same world-wide things. Like him, he looks out 
into the black and eyeless storm, the ceaseless drift 
of atoms; like him, he surveys the States and Em- 
pires of the past, and sees in their history, their 
revolutions, their rise and decline, but the history 
of the wind which, in the Hebrew phrase, goes 
circling in its circles, sovdv sovev, and returneth to 

^'^ The origin, the meaning, the number, and even the gender 
of this word have all been disputed. Thus the use of the 
original is convenient as it avoids committal to any one of the 
numerous theories of theologians or Hebraists. Delitzsch has 
sifted the evidence with scrupulous care and impartiality, 
whilst Renan's monograph possesses both erudition and charm. 



i8o STATES AND EMPIRES 

the place whence it came, and universal darkness 
awaits the world, and oblivion universal the tedious 
story of man. In work after work of Machiavelli, 
letters, tales, dramas, historical and political treat- 
ises, this conception recurs. It is the central and 
informing thought of his life as a philosophical 
thinker. But unlike Vico, Machiavelli avoids be- 
coming the slave of a theory. He shadows forth 
this system of some dim cycle in human affairs as 
a conception in which his own mind finds quiescence, 
if not rest. Its precise character he nowhere de- 
scribes. 

Amongst philosophical historians Tacitus occupies 
a unique position. He rivals Dante in the cumula- 
tive effect of sombre detail and in the gloomy energy 
which hate supplies. In depth and variety of cre- 
ative insight he approaches Balzac,*® whilst in his 
peculiar province, the psychology of death, he stands 
alone. His is the most profoundly imaginative na- 
ture that Rome produced. Three centuries before 
the fall of Rome he appears to apprehend or to for- 
bode that event, and he turns to a consideration of 

*^ What figures from the Comedie Humaine of Roman soci- 
ety of the first century throng the pages of Tacitus — Sejanus, 
Arruntius, Piso, Otho, Bassus, Csecina, Tigellinus, Lucanus, 
Petronius, Seneca, Corbulo, Burrus, Silius, Drusus, Pallas, 
and Narcissus; and those tragic women of the Annals — im- 
perious, recklessly daring, beautiful or loyal — Livia, Messa- 
lina, Vipsania, the two Agrippinas, mothers of Caligula and of 
Nero, Urgulania, Sabina Poppcea, Epicharis, Lollia Paulina, 
Lepida, Calpurnia, Pontia, Servilia, and Acte ! 



THE CYCLIC THEORY i8i 

the customs of the Teutonic race as if already in 
the first century he discerned the very manner of 
the cataclysm of the fourth. Both his great works, 
the Histories and the Annals, read at moments like 
variations and developments of the same tragic 
theme, the " wrath of the gods against Rome," the 
deum ira in rem Romanam of the Annals; whilst 
in the Histories the theory of retribution appears in 
the reflection, non esse curae deis securitatem nos- 
tram, esse tdtionem, with which he closes his pre- 
liminary survey of the havoc and civil fury of the 
time of Galba — "Not our preservation, but their 
own vengeance, do the gods desire." It is as if, 
transported in imagination far into the future, 
Tacitus looked back and pronounced the judgment 
of Rome in a spirit not dissimilar from that of Saint 
Augustine. Yet the Rome of Trajan and of the 
Antonines, of Severus and of Aurelian, was to come, 
and, as if distrusting his rancour and the wounded 
pride of an oligarch, Tacitus betrays in other pass- 
ages habits of thought and speculation of a widely 
different bearing. His sympathies with the Stoic 
sect were instinctive, but in his reserve and deep 
reticence he resembles, not Seneca, but Machiavelli 
or Thucydides. 

A passage in the Annals may fitly represent the 
impression of reserve which these three mighty 
spirits, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Machiavelli, at mo- 
ments convey. " Sed mihi haec ac talia audienti in 
incerto judicium est, f atone res mortalium et necessi- 



i82 STATES AND EMPIRES 

tate immutabili an forte volvantur; quippe sapien- 
tissimos veterum, quique sectam eorum aemulantur, 
diversos reperias, ac niultis insitam opinionem non 
initia nostri, non finem, non denique homines dis 
curae; ideo creberrime tristia in bonos, laeta apud 
deteriores esse ; contra alii f atum quidem congruere 
rebus putant, sed non e vagis stellis, verum apud 
principia et nexus naturalium causarum; ac tamen 
electionem vitae nobis relinquunt, quam ubi elegeris, 
certum imminentium ordinem ; neque mala vel bona 
quae vulgus putet." ^"^ 

*^ In Richard Greneway's translation, London, 1598, one of 
the earliest renderings of Tacitus into English, this passage 
stands as follows : 

" When I heare of these and the like things, I can give no 
certaine judgement, whether the affaires of mortall men are 
governed by fate and immutable necessitie ; or have their 
course and change by chaunce and fortune. For thou shalt 
finde, that as well those which were accounted wise in auncient 
times, as such as were imitators of their sect, do varie and dis- 
agree therein ; some do resolutlie beleeve that the gods have no 
care of man's beginning or ending; no, not of man at all. 
Whereof it proceedeth that the vertuous are tossed and af- 
flicted with so many miseries; and the vitious (vicious) and 
bad triumphe with so great prosperities. Contrarilie, others 
are of opinion that fate and destinie may well stand with the 
course of our actions; yet nothing at all depend of the planets 
or stars, but proceede from a connexion of naturall causes 
as from their beginning. And these graunt withall, that we 
have free choise and election what life to follow ; which being 
once chosen, we are guided after, by a certain order of causes 
unto our end. Neither do they esteeme those things to be 
good or bad which the vulgar do so call." 

Murphy's frequent looseness of phraseology, false elegance, 
and futile commentary, are nowhere more conspicuous than in 



THE CYCLIC THEORY 183 

And yet the theory of retribution had not been 
without its influence upon Thucydides. It even 
forces the structure of his later books into the regu- 
larity of a tragedy, in which Athens is the prota- 
gonist, and a verse of Sophocles the theme. But 
his earlier and greater manner prevails, and from 
the study of his work the mind passes easily to the 
contemplation of the doom which awaited the de- 
stroyers of Athens, the monstrous tyrannies in Syra- 
cuse, and Lacedsemon's swift ruin. 

Another phase of the position of Tacitus deserves 
attention. It was a habit of writers of the eight- 
eenth century, in treating of the vicissitudes of em- 
pires, to state one problem and solve another. The 
question asked was, " Is there a law regulating the 
fall of empires? " ; but the question answered, satis- 
factorily or unsatisfactorily, was, " Is there a 
remedy ? " Like the elder Cato, Tacitus seems in 
places to refer the ruin which he anticipated to 
Rome's departure from the austerity and simplicity 
of the early centuries. In the luxury of the Caesars 
he discerns but another condemnation of the policy 
of Caius Julius. 

The use which Gibbon has made of this argument 
is celebrated. In Gibbon's life, indeed, regret for 
the Empire, for the Rome of Trajan and of Marcus, 
exercises as strong a sway, artistically, as regret for 
the Republic exercises over the art and thought of 

his version of the sixth book of the Annals and of this para- 
graph in particular. 



i84 STATES AND E^IPIRES 

Tacitus. Both desiderate a world which is not now, 
musing with fierce bitterness or cold resignation 
upon that which was once but is no longer. Both 
ponder the question, " How could the disaster have 
been averted ? How could the decline of Rome have 
been stayed?" Tacitus is the greater poet — more 
penetrating in vision, a greater master of his 
medium, profounder in his insight into the human 
heart. But a common atmosphere of elegy pervades 
the work of both, and if Gibbon again and again 
forgets the inquiry with which he set out, the 
charm of his work gains thereby. A pensive melan- 
choly akin to that of Petrarch's Trionfi, or the An- 
tiqiiitcs dc Ro})ic of Joachim du Bellay, redeems 
from monotony, by the emotion it communicates, 
the over-stately march of many a balanced period."*® 
But it were as vain to seek in Tasso for a philo- 
sophic theory of the Crusades as seek in Gibbon a 
philosophic theory of the decline of empires. 

^^Lifc, Love, Fame, and Death are themes of Petrarch's 
Triuinplis. The same profound sense of the transiency of 
things, which meets us in the studied pages of his confessional 
— the Latin treatise Dc Contonptu Muiidi — pervades these 
exquisite poems. Du Bellay's Antiquities, which Spenser's 
translation under the title of The Ruins of Rome has made 
familiar, were written after a visit to Rome in attendance 
upon the Cardinal du Bellay. and first published in 1558. The 
beautiful Souge s»r Rome accompanied them. Two years 
later Du Bellay, then in his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, 
died. The preciousness of these poems is enhanced rather 
than diminished if we imagine that the friend of Ronsard en- 
deavoured to wed the music of Villon's Ballades to the pass- 
ing of empires and of Rome. 



THE CYCLIC THEORY 185 

His artistic purpose was strengthened to some- 
thing like a prophetic purpose by the environment 
of his age, the incidents of his Hfe, and the bent of 
his own intellect. He combats the same enemy as 
Voltaire waged truceless war upon — the subtle, 
intangible, omnipresent spirit of insincerity, hypo- 
crisy, and superstition, from which the bigotry and 
religious oppression of the eighteenth and early nine- 
teenth centuries derived their power. And Gib- 
bon's indebtedness to Voltaire is amazing. There 
is scarcely a living conception in the Decline and 
Fall which cannot be traced to that nimble, varied, 
and all-illuminating spirit. Even the ironic method 
of the two renowned chapters was prompted by a 
section in the Essai sur les Moeurs. 

Thus to the theory of Tacitus, the departure from 
the ancient simplicity of life. Gibbon adds the theory 
of Zosimus.^^ With Zosimus he affirms that the 
triumph of Christianism sealed the fate of Rome, 
and in the Emperor Julian Gibbon finds the same 
heroic but ill-starred defender of the past, as Tacitus 

■*'' In the generation succeeding that of St. Augustine, the 
fall of Rome formed the subject of a work in six books by 
Zosimus, an official of high rank at Constantinople. The fifth 
and sixth books deal with the period between the death of 
Theodosius and the capture of the city by Alaric (a. d. 395- 
410). Zosimus ascribes the disaster to the revolution effected 
in the life and conduct of the Romans by the new religion. 
The tone of the whole history is evidently inspired by the 
brilliant but irregular works of the Syrian Eunapius whom 
hero-worship and the regret for a lost cause blinded to all 
save the imposing designs of the Emperor Julian. 



i86 STATES AND EMPIRES 

found in the unfortunate Germanicus, This con- 
ception informs Gibbon's work throughout, prompt- 
ing ahke the furtive, maHgnant, or tasteless sketches 
of the great Pontiffs and the great C^sars, and the 
finish, the studied care, the vivid detail lavished 
upon the portraits of their enemies. Half-seriously, 
half-smiling at his own enthusiasm, he seems to 
discern in Mohammed, in Saladin, and the Ottoman 
power, the avengers of Julian and the Rome of the 
Antonines. 

And thus Ruskin, inspired by a mood of his great 
teacher, traces the decline of Venice to its abandon- 
ment of Christianism, and Gibbon, influenced by 
Voltaire and the environment of his age, traces the 
fall of Rome to the adoption of Christianism. 

§ 5. what is meant by the " fall of an 
empire"? 

Underlying both these classes of theories, the 
retributive and the cyclic, and underlying much of 
the speculation both of the eighteenth and of the 
nineteenth century upon the subject, is the assump- 
tion that the decay of empires is accidental, or arises 
from causes that can be averted, or from the opera- 
tion of forces that can be modified. The mediaeval 
conception of one empire upon the earth, which yet 
shall endure forever in righteousness, influences even 
the mind of Gibbon. He had studied Polybius, and 
Rome's indefeasible right to the government of the 
world was the faith which Polybius had announced. 



THE FALL OF EMPIRES 187 

And in the hour of Judaea's humiliation and ruin 
her prophets had still proclaimed a similar hope of 
everlasting dominion to Israel. 

But, as the centuries advance, it grows ever 
clearer that regret or surprise at the passing of em- 
pires is hke regret or surprise at the passing of 
youth. Man might as well start once more to dis- 
cover the elixir of life and alchemy' s secrets as hope 
to found an empire that shall not pass away. 

To ponder too curiously the question why a State 
declines is like pondering too curiously the question 
why a man dies. In the vicissitudes of States we 
are on the threshold of the same Mystery as in the 
vicissitudes of nature and of human life. The tracts 
and regions governed by cause and effect are behind 
us. An empire, like a work of art, is an end in 
itself, but duration in the former is an integral por- 
tion or phase of that end. From the concept, " Em- 
pire," duration is inseparable, and the extent of that 
duration is involved in the concept itself. Dura- 
tion and modes, religious or ethical, are alike de- 
termined from within, from the divine thought 
realising itself through the individual in the State. 
The curve of an empire's history is directed by no 
self -existent, isolated causes. It is a portion of the 
universe, evading analysis as the beauty of a statue 
evades analysis, lost in the vastness of nature, in the 
labyrinths of the soul which created and of the soul 
which contemplates its perfection. 

Therefore regret for the fall of an empire, unless, 



i8"8 STATES AND EMPIRES 

as in the works of a Gibbon or a Tacitus, it aids in 
transforming the present nearer to the heart's de- 
sire, is vain enough. The Eros of Praxiteles and 
the Athene of Scopas, like the Cena of Leonardo 
and the Martyr of Titian, are beyond our reach, and 
with all our industry we shall hardly recover the 
ninety tragedies of Aeschylus. But the moment 
within the soul of the artist which these works en- 
shrined, which by their inception and completion 
they did but strengthen and prolong, that moment of 
vision has not passed away. It has become part of 
the eternal, as the aspirations, fortitudes, heroisms, 
endurances, great aims which Rome or Hellas imper- 
sonates have become part of the eternal. Man, 
born into a world which was not made for him, is 
perplexed, until in such moments the end for which 
he was himself fashioned is revealed. The artist, 
the hero, and the prophet give of their peace unto 
the world. Yet is this gift but a secondary thing, 
and subject to cause, and time, and change. 

In the consummation of the life of a State the 
world-soul realises itself in a moment analogous to 
this moment in art. The form perishes, nation, city, 
empire; but the creative thought, the soul of the 
State, endures. As the marble or poem represents 
the supreme hour in the individual life, the ideal 
long pursued imaged there, perfect or imperfect, so 
the State represents the ideal pursued by the race. 
It is the embodiment in living immaterial substance 
of the creative purpose of the race, of the individual, 



THE FALL OF EMPIRES 189 

and ultimately of the Divine. The State is imma- 
terial ; no visible form betrays it. Athene or Roma 
are but the abitrary emblems of an invisible, ever 
changing life, most subtle, most complex, yet indi- 
visibly one, woven each day anew from myriads 
of aspirations, designs, ideals, recorded or unre- 
corded. Those heroic personalities, a Hildebrand, a 
Napoleon, a Cromwell, a Richelieu, who usurp the 
attributes of the State, do but interpret the State 
to itself, rudely or faultlessly. Philip and Alex- 
ander, Baber and Akbar, are the men who respond 
to, who feel more profoundly than other men, the 
ideal, the impulse which beats at the heart of the 
race. The divine thought is in them more immanent 
than in other men. To Akbar the vision of the con- 
tinent from Himalaya to either sea, all brought to 
the feet of Mohammed, of Islam, impersonated in 
himself, is an ethereal vision like that which leads 
Alexander eastward beyond the Tigris to spread far 
the name of Hellas. Akbar started as his grand- 
father had started, and Baber's faith was not less 
sincere.^^ But the contact with other races and 

^° Baber's own memoirs, Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din Muhamr- 
med Baber, emperor of Hindustan, one of the priceless docu- 
ments of history, show the manner in which he conceived his 
mission. Here is his account of the supreme incident in his 
spiritual life : " In January, 1527, messengers came from 
Mehdi Khwajeh to announce that Sanka, the Rana of Mewar, 
and Hassan Khan Mewati, were on their march from the 
west. On February nth I went forth to the Holy War. On 
the 25th I mounted to survey my posts, and during the ride I 
was struck with the reflection that I had always resolved to 



I90 STATES AND EMPIRES 

other creeds diverted or heightened this first purpose 
of the Mongol, and at the pinnacle of earthly power, 
Akbar met and yielded to the temptation, which 
dazzled for a moment even the steady gaze of Napo- 
leon. Apprehending the unity beneath the diver- 
sity of the religions of his various subjects, Hindoo, 
Persian, Mohammedan, Christian, Akbar dared the 
lofty enterprise and essayed to extract the common 
truth of all, selecting, as Julian had done, twelve 
centuries before him, the sun as the symbol of uni- 
versal beneficence, and truth, and life. He failed, 
but failed greatly. 

The distinctions of a great State, art, action, 
empire, supremacy in thought, supremacy in deed, 
supremacy in conception of the ideal of humanity, 
like rays emanating from the same divine centre, 
thither converge again. Any attempt to explain 

make an effectual repentance at some period of my life. I 
now spoke with myself thus — ' O my soul, how long wilt thou 
continue to take pleasure in sin? Not bitter is repentance: 
then taste it thou ! Since the day wherein thou didst set 
forth on a Holy War, thou hast seen Death before thine eyes 
for thy salvation. And he who sacrificeth his life to save his 
soul shall attain that exalted state thou wottest of.' Then I 
sent for the gold and the silver goblets, and broke them, and 
drank wine no more, and purified my heart. And having thus 
heard from the Voice that errs not, the tidings of peace, and 
being now for the first time a Mussulman indeed, I com- 
manded that the Holy War shall begin with the grand war 
against the evil in our hearts." Such was the mood in which, 
on the 24th of the first Jemadi, A. H. 933, Baber proceeded to 
found the Mogul Empire. 



THE FALL OF EMPIRES 191 

their succession and decay in terms of a mechanical 
law must thus lead either to the reserve of Machia- 
velli, to the outworn fantasies of Bossuet, or to such 
formulas as those of Ruskin and Gibbon, in which 
synchronous phenomena are woven into a chain of 
causes and effects. 

Even in the sphere of individual existence death 
is but a mode of human thought, a name which has 
no counterpart in the frame of things. As life is 
but a mode of the divine thought, so death is but 
a mode of human thought, a creation of the intellect 
the more vividly to realise itself and life. Every 
effect is in turn a cause. Therefore every cause is 
eternal, an infinite series, existing at once successive 
and simultaneous; for the effect is not the death of, 
but the continued life of the cause. Universes and 
the soul of man are but self -trans formations of the 
first last Cause, the One, the Cause within Cause 
immortal, effect within effect unending. " Man," 
it has been said, " is the inventor of Nothingness. 
Nature and the Universe know it not." The past 
wields over the present a power which could never 
be derived from Death and Nothingness. No age, 
as was pointed out in the first chapter, has felt this 
power so intimately as the present. As if we had 
a thousand lives to live, we consume the present in 
the study of the past, and sink from sight ourselves 
while still contemplating the scenes designed for 
other eyes. Even our most living impulses we in- 



192 STATES AND EMPIRES 

terpret as if they were sacred runes carved by long- 
vanished hands, so that it seems as if the dead alone 
lived, and the living alone were dead. 

But the soul unifies all things, and is then most 
in the present when most deeply absorbed in the 
past. The soul of man is the true Logos of the 
universe. It is the contemporary of all the ages, 
and to none of the aeons is it a stranger. It heard 
the informing voice which instructed the planets in 
their paths, which moulded the rocks, the bones of 
the earth, and cast the sea and the far-stretched 
plains and the hills about them like a covering of 
flesh. Therefore time and death and nothingness 
are but shadows, which the intellect of man sets 
over against the substance which lives and is eter- 
nally. 

And thus in the vicissitudes of States, even more 
impressively than elsewhere in the universal process 
of transformation which Nature is, the daring 
metaphor of the Hebrew, " As a vesture shalt Thou 
change them, and they shall be changed," seems 
realised. The death of a State, the fall of an em- 
pire, are but phases in their history, by which a com- 
plete self-realisation is attained, or the perpetuation 
of their ideals under other forms, as Egypt in 
Hellas, Hellas in Rome, is secured. 

In Portugal's short span of empire, her day of 
brief and troubled splendour, her monarchs realise, 
even at the hazard of a temporary eclipse of the 
nation's independence, the aspirations of the race, 



THE FALL OF EMPIRES 193 

which slowly arising, and growing in force and in- 
tensity, had become the fixed tyrannous desire of a 
people, until, in Camoens' terse phrase of Manuel, 
" from that one great thought it never swerved." 
Another policy and other aims than those which her 
monarchs pursued — tolerance instead of fanaticism, 
prudence instead of heroism, national patriotism in- 
stead of imperial, homely common-sense instead of 
glorious wisdom — all or any of these might have 
warded off the doom of Portugal and of the house 
of Avis. But these things were not in the blood of 
Lusitania, nor would this have been the nation of 
Vasco da Gama and Camoens, of Alboquerque and 
Cabral. It is as vain to seek in depopulation for 
the causes of the fall of Portugal as in the Inqui- 
sition or the Papal power. Even Buckle, that 
mighty statistician, would hardly risk the determin- 
ing of the ratio which may not be overstepped be- 
tween the bounds of an empire and the extent of the 
nation which creates it. If her yeomen forsook the 
fields and left the soil of Portugal untilled, if her 
chivalry forsook their estates, the question confronts 
us : What is the character, the heart of a race which 
acts in this manner? What is the ideal powerful 
enough to make the hazard of a nation's death pref- 
erable to the abandonment of that ideal? The 
nation which sent its bravest to die at Al-Kasr al 
Kebir ^^ is not a nation of adventurers. Nor do the 

51 The battle of AI-Kasr al Kebir, in Morocco, about fifty 
miles south of Tangiers, was fought on August 4th, 1578. 



194 STATES AND EMPIRES 

instances of Phocasa, of the Cimbri, or the Ostro- 
goths afford any analogy here. Dom Sebastian's 
device fits not only his own career but the history of 
the race of which at that epoch he was at once the 
king and the ideal hero — " A glorious death makes 
the whole life glorious." And the genius of the 
nation sanctioned his life and his heroic death. To 
Portugal Dom Sebastian became such a figure as 
Frederick Barbarossa, dead on the far-off crusade, 
had been to the Middle Age, and for two centuries, 
whenever night thickened around the fortunes of the 
race, the spirit of Dom Sebastian returned to illu- 
mine the gloom, showing himself to a few faithful 
ones; and in very truth the spirit of his deeds and 
of their fathers never died in the hearts of the 
Portuguese, inspiring whatever is memorable in their 
later history. 

Spain completes in the expulsion of the Moors the 
warfare, the Crusade, which began with Pelayo and 
the remnant of the Visigoths. Spain, as Spain, 
could not act otherwise, could not act as Germany 
acted, as England acted. Venice, so far from aban- 
doning the faith of the Nazarene, as Ruskin fancied, 
barred of her commerce, seeing her power pass to 
Portugal, did yet, solitary and unaided, face the 
Ottoman, and for two generations made the Cru- 

The king, Dom Sebastian, and the flower of the Portuguese 
nobility died on the field. As in Scotland after Flodden, there 
was not a house of name in Portugal which had not its dead 
to mourn. 



THE FALL OF EMPIRES 195 

sades live again. It is another Venice, yet religion 
is not the cause of that otherness. She defies Paul 
V in the name of freedom, in the days of Sarpi,^^ 
as she had defied Innocent III in the name of em- 
pire in the days of Dandolo. 

Hellas still lives, still forms an element, vitalising 
and omnipresent, in the life of States and in human 
destiny. Roman grandeur is not dead whilst Sulla, 
Tacitus, Montesquieu, Machiavelli survive. To 
Petrarch the Rome of the Scipios is more present 
than the Rome of the Colonnas, and it numbers 
among its citizens Byron, Goethe, and Leopardi. 

For like all great empires Rome strove not for 
herself but for humanity, and dying, had yet 
strength, by her laws, her religion, her language, 
to impart her spirit and the secret of her peace to 
other races and to other times. In the world's 
palcestra she had thrown the discus to a point which 

^2 The genius of this great thinker, patriot, scholar, and 
historian, along with the heroism of the war of Candia, "the 
longest and most memorable siege on record," as Voltaire 
designates it, throw a dying lustre over the Venice of the 
seventeenth century, which in painting has then but such 
names as those of Podovanino and the younger Cagliari. 
Sarpi's defence of Venice against Paul V, an attorney in the 
seat of Hildebrand, occurred in 1605. It consists of two 
works — the Tractate and the Considerations — and probably 
of a third drawn up for the secret use of the Council of Ten. 
Like Voltaire, Sarpi seems to have lived with a pen in his 
hand. His manuscripts in the Venice archives fill twenty- 
nine folio volumes. The first collected edition of his works 
was published, not unfitly, in the year of the fall of the 
Bastille. 



196 STATES AND EMPIRES 

the empires that come after, dowered as Rome was 
dowered, and by kindred ideals fired, must struggle 
to surpass, or in this divine antagonism be broken. 

For what does the fall of Rome mean, and what 
are its relations to this Empire of Britain? In an 
earlier chapter I illustrated my conception of the 
Rome of the fifth century in the similitude of a Goth 
bending over a dead Roman, and by the flare of 
a torch seeking to read on the still brow the secret 
of his own destiny. Rome does not die there. Her 
genius lives on in the Gothic race, deep, penetrating, 
and all-informing, and in the picked valour of that 
race, which for six hundred years spends itself in 
forging England, it is deepest, most penetrating, and 
all-informing, Roman definiteness of thought and 
act were in that nation touched by mysticism to 
reverie and compassion. From the ashes of the 
dead ideal of concrete justice, imaginative justice 
is born. Right becomes righteousness, but the liv- 
ing genius which was Rome still pulses within it. 
By the energy of feudalism the ancient subjection of 
the individual to the State is challenged. Freedom 
is born, but like some winged glory hovering aloft, 
rivets the famished eyes of men, till at last, 
descending by the Rhine, it fills with its radiance a 
darkened world. Religious oppression is stayed, 
but. Phoenix-like, yet another ideal arises, and gener- 
ations later, what a temple is reared for it by the 
Seine ! And now in this era, and at this latest time, 
behold in England the glory has once more alighted, 



THE FALL OF EMPIRES 197 

as once for a brief space by the Rhine and Seine, but 
surely to make here its lasting mansionary. For in 
very truth, in all that freedom and all that justice 
possess of power towards good amongst men, is not 
England as it were earth's central shrine and this 
race the vanguard of humanity? 

Rome was the synthesis of the empires of the 
past, of Hellas, of Egypt, of Assyria. In her pur- 
poses their purposes lived. Mediaeval imperialism 
strove not to rival Rome but to be Rome. In 
Britain the spirit of Empire receives a new incarna- 
tion. The form decays, the divine idea remains, the 
creative spirit gliding from this to that, indestruct- 
ible. And thus the destiny of empires involves the 
consideration of the destiny of man. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE 
DESTINY OF MAN 

Though life itself and all its modes are transient, 
but shadows cast through the richly-tinted veil of 
Maya upon the everlasting deep of things, yet such 
dreams as those of perpetual peace and of empires 
exempt from degeneration and decay, like the illu- 
sion of perpetual happiness, the prayer of Spinoza 
for some one " supreme, continuous, unending bliss," 
have mocked man from the beginning of recorded 
history to the present hour. They are ancient as 
the rocks and their musings from eternity, inextin- 
guishable as the elan of the soul imprisoned in time 
towards that which is beyond time. 

And yet the effect of these, as of all false illusions, 
is but to render the value of Reality — I had almost 
said of the real Illusion — more poignant. Indeed, 
** false " and " unreal " at all times are mere desig- 
nations we apply to the hours of dim and uncertain 
vision ^^ when tested by the standard which the mo- 
ments of perfect insight afford. 

S3 I am aware of Spinoza's distinction of the " clara et dis- 
tincta idea " and the " inadequatce idea " ; but the distinction 
above flows from a conception of the universe and of man's 
destiny which is not Spinoza's nor Spinozistic. 

198 



DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 199 

Nothing is more tedious, yet nothing is more in- 
structive, than the study of the formulated ideals, 
the imagings of what life might be or life ought 
to be, of poets or systematic philosophers. Nothing 
so instantly reconciles us to war as the delineations 
of humanity under " meek-eyed Peace "; and to the 
passing of visible things, empires, states, arts, laws, 
and this universal frame of things, as such attempts 
as have been made to stay time and change, and 
abrogate the ordinances of the world. 

Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht. 
Why shapest thou the world? 'twas shapen long ago.54 

Nor does this result in the mood of Candide. 
The effort unconquered and unending to behold the 
visible and the passing as in very truth it is, leads 
to a deeper vision of the Unseen and of the Eternal 
as in very truth it is. 

Thus we are prepared to consider the following 
question. Given that death is nothing, and the de- 
cline of empires but a change of form, will this 
empire of Imperial Britain also decline and fall? 
Will the form it now enshrines pass away, as the 
forms of Persia, Rome, the Empire of Akbar, have 
passed away? The question resolves itself into two 
parts — in what does the youth of a race or of an 

5* Was machst du an der Welt ? sie ist schon gemacht ; 
Der Herr der Schopfung hat alles bedacht. 
Dein Loos ist gefallen, verfolge die Weise, 
Der Weg ist begonnen, vollende die Reise. 

Goethe, West-ostlicher Divan, Buck der Spriiche. 



200 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

empire consist ? And, secondly, is it possible by any 
analogy from the past to measure or gauge the pos- 
sible or probable duration of Imperial Britain, to 
determine to what era, say in the history of such an 
empire as Rome or Islam, the present era in the his- 
tory of Imperial Britain corresponds ? 

§ I. THE PRESENT STAGE IN" THE HISTORY OF 
IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

First of all with regard to the former question. 
Recent studies in ethnology have made it clear that 
youth, and all that this term implies of latent or 
realised energies, mental, physical, intellectual, is not 
the inevitable attribute and exclusive possession of 
uncivilised or of recently civilised races. Yet this 
assumption still underlies much of the current specu- 
lation on the subject. Last century it was received 
as an axiomatic truth. Thus in the time of Louis 
XV, when a romantic interest first invested the 
American Indians, French writers saw in them the 
prototypes of the Germans described by Tacitus. 
Not only Voltaire and Rousseau, but Montesquieu 
himself, regard them curiously, as if in the back- 
woods dwelt the future dominators of the world. 
Comparisons were drawn between their manners, 
their religion, their customs, and those of the Goths 
and the Franks, and litterateurs indulged the fancy 
that in delineating the Hurons of the Mississippi 
they were preparing for posterity a literary surprise 
and a document lasting as the Germania. Such 



THE PRESENT STAGE 201 

comparisons are still at times made, but they are like 
the comparison between a rising and a receding tide, 
both trace the same line along the sands, but it is the 
same tide only in appearance. It is the contrast be- 
tween the simplicity of childhood and of seniHty, 
between the simplicity of a race dowered with 
many-sided genius and of a race dowered with but 
one-sided genius. It is neither in the absence of 
civilisation, nor in its newness, that the youth of a 
race consists; nor does the old age of a race consist 
in refinement, nor capacity for the arts necessarily 
imply decline of political energy. The victories of 
the Germans in 1870 were like Fate's ironic com- 
ment upon the inferences drawn from their love of 
philosophy. Abstract thought had not unfitted the 
race for war, nor " Wertherism " for the battlefield. 
But, as in the life of the individual, so in the life 
of a race, youth consists in capacity for enthusiasm 
for a great ideal, capacity to frame, resolution to 
pursue, devotion to sacrifice all to a great political 
end. Russia, for instance, has only recently come 
within the influence of European culture, but this 
does not make the Slav a youthful race. The 
Slavonic is indeed perhaps the oldest people in 
Europe. Its literature, its art, its music, the charac- 
teristics of its society alike attest this. Superstition 
is not youth, else we might look to the hut of the 
Samoyede even with more confidence than to the 
cabin of the Moujik for the imperial race of the 
future. -And prolificness in a race does as surely de- 



202 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

note resignation to be governed, as the genius to 
govern others. 

And the Slav, as we have seen, has at no period 
of his history shown that " youth " which consists 
in capacity for a great pohtical ideal, either in 
Poland, or amongst the Czechs, or in Russia. 

The present German empire assuredly exhibits in 
nothing the qualities of ancient lineage ; yet the race 
which composes it is the same race as was once 
united under Hapsburg, under Luxemburg, under 
Hohenstauffen, and under Franconian, as now under 
the Hohenzollern dynasty. 

The United States as a nation bears the same rela- 
tion to Britain as the Moorish kingdom in Spain 
bore to the Saracenic empire of Bagdad. It is a 
fragment, a colossal fragment torn from the central 
mass ; but not only in its language, its literature, its 
religion and its laws, but in individual and national 
peculiarities, at least in the deeper moments of his- 
tory and of life, the original stock asserts itself. 
The State is young; but the race is precisely of the 
same remoteness as Britain and the Greater Britain. 

Passing to the second point — at what epoch do 
we now stand as compared with Rome or Islam? 
It is not unusual to speak of Britain as an aged em- 
pire, but such estimates or descriptions commonly 
rest upon a misapprehension, first, of the period in 
which the Nation of England strictly speaking arises, 
and secondly, of the period in which the Empire of 
Britain arises. 



THE PRESENT STAGE 203 

The traditional date of the landing of Hengist 
does not indicate a moment analogous to the moment 
in the history of Rome marked by the traditional 
date of the foundation of the city. The date 776 
B. c. marks the close of a process of transformation 
and slow evolving unity extending over centuries, so 
that the era of Romulus and the early kings, Numa, 
Ancus, and Servius, may be regarded as an epoch 
in Rome's history analogous to the period in Eng- 
land's history between Senlac and the constitutional 
struggle of the thirteenth century. The former is 
the period in which the civic unity of Rome is com- 
pleted. The latter is the period in which the 
national unity of England is completed. Rome is 
now finally conscious to itself of its career as a city, 
urbs Roma, as England in the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries is finally conscious to itself of its career as 
a nation. Magna Carta and the constitutional 
struggle which followed may be said to determine 
the course of the national and political life of Eng- 
land as much as the Servian Code founded the civic 
unity and determined the character of the constitu- 
tional life of Rome. 

And, as was pointed out in an earlier chapter, al- 
ready in Rome and in England there are premoni- 
tions, foreshado wings of the future. The design of 
the city on the seven hills is the design of the eternal 
city, and the devotion of the gens Fabia announces 
the Roman legion. And in those wars of Cregy and 
Poitiers, the constancy, the dauntless heart, and the 



204 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

steady hand of the English archers, which broke the 
chivalry of France, what is it but the constancy of 
Waterloo, the squares, the charge, the Duke's words, 
spoken quietly as the words of fate, decreeing an 
empire's fall, " Stand up, Guards ! " ? And in 1381, 
the tramp of the feet of the hurrying peasants, sons 
and grandsons of the archers of Cregy, in the great 
Revolt, indignant at ingratitude and wrong, what is 
it but the prelude to the supremacy of the People of 
England, to the Petition of Right, to Cromwell's 
Ironsides, to Chartism and Reform Acts, and the 
Democracy, self-governing, imperial and warlike of 
the present hour? So that even as a nation, about 
eighteen generations may be said to sum England's 
life, whilst, as we have seen, Britain's conscious life 
as an empire extends backwards but to three genera- 
tions or to four. Thus if the question were asked, 
With what period in the history of Rome does the 
present age correspond? I should say, roughly 
speaking, it corresponds with the period of Titus 
and Vespasian, when Rome has still a course of three 
hundred years to run; and in the history of Islam, 
with the period of the early Abbassides, when the 
fall of the Saracenic dominion is still some four cen- 
turies removed. 

Does this justify us in inferring that the course 
which England has to run will extend still over three 
centuries and that then England too will pass away, 
as Rome, as the Saracenic empire, have passed away ? 
So far as the determination of the eras in our his- 



THE PRESENT STAGE 205 

tory which correspond in development to eras in the 
history of Rome or of Islam is concerned, the infer- 
ence from analogy possesses a certain validity. 
And the accidental or fixed resemblances between the 
empires of Islam,^^ Rome, and Imperial Britain are 
numerous and striking enough to render such com- 
parisons of real significance to speculative politics. 
But the similarity in structural expansion or in en- 
vironment which can be traced throughout the com- 
pleted dramas of Rome and Islam is to be found only 
in the initial stages of Imperial Britain. Then the 
argument from analogy fails, and our judgment is 
at a stand. 

Assuming that each imperial race starts its career 
dowered with a vital capacity of definite range, and 
allowing for the necessary divergences in their 
course between a civic and a national state, Imperial 
Britain, regarded from its past, may be said in the 
present era to have reached a stage represented by 
the era of Vespasian and Titus; but to proceed fur- 
ther is perilous, so momentous is the distinction that 
now arises between the circumstances of the two em- 
pires. During the present century the vast trans- 
formations which have been effected by science in 

^5 Recent investigation has made it clear that the history of 
Islamic Arabia is not severed by any violent convulsion from 
pre-Mohammedan Arabia. " The times of ignorance " were 
not the desolate waste which Tabari, " the Livy of the Arabs," 
paints, and down to the close of the eighteenth century the 
comparison between England, Rome, and Islam offers a fair 
field for speculative politics. 



2o6 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

the surroundings of man's physical Hfe make all 
speculation upon the duration of Imperial Britain 
by analogies drawn from the duration either of 
Rome or of other empires, indecisive or rash. 

The growth of the idea of freedom, and the 
modern interpretation of that idea in the spirit of 
Condorcet, have, within the bounds of the English 
nation itself, increased the intercourse between ranks 
to a degree unparalleled in the ancient world. The 
self -recuperative powers of the race have been 
strengthened by the course of its political and reli- 
gious history. Fresh blood adds new energy to 
effete stocks. The effect of this restorative power 
from within is heightened in manifold ways by such 
a circumstance as the enormous facilities of locomo- 
tion which have arisen during the past two genera- 
tions. 

In the age of the first conscious beginnings of 
Imperial Britain, the communication between the 
regions of the empire was as difficult as in the Rome 
of Sulla; but the development of that consciousness 
has been synchronous, not only with increased 
intercourse between the ranks of the same nation, 
but with increased intercourse between all the 
various climes of an empire upon which the sun 
never sets. From city to city, from town to town, 
from province to province, from colony to colony, 
emigration and immigration, change and interchange 
of vast masses of the population are incessant. This 
increased intercommunication between the various 



THE DESTINY OF MAN 207 

members of the race, the influences of the change 
of cHmate upon the individual, aided by such im- 
perceptible but many-sided forces as spring from 
the diffusion of knowledge and culture, mark a 
revolution in the vital resources and the environ- 
ment in the British, as distinguished from the 
Saracenic or Roman race, so extraordinary that 
all analogy beyond the point which we have indicated 
is impossible, or so guarded by intricate hypotheses 
as to be useless or misleading. 

Nature seems pondering some vast and new ex- 
periment, and an empire has arisen whose future 
course, whether we consider its political or its eco- 
nomic, its physical or its mental resources, leaves 
conjecture behind. The world-stage is set as for 
the opening of a drama which, at least in the magni- 
tude of its incidents and the imposing circumstance 
of its action, will make the former achievements of 
men dwindle and seem of little account. 

§ 2. THE DESTINY OF MAN 

At this point we may fitly close our survey, and 
these " Reflections," by endeavouring to determine, 
not the remote future of Imperial Britain, but its 
immediate task, Fate's mandate to the present, and 
as we have considered Imperial Britain in its rela- 
tions to the destiny of past empires, pause for a 
moment in conclusion upon its relations to the des- 
tiny of man. 

To the ancient world, man in his march across 



2o8 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

the deserts of Time had left fehcity and the golden 
age far behind him, and Rousseau's vision of Hu- 
manity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting 
ever farther from the path of its peace, had charmed 
the melancholy or the despair of Virgil and his great 
master in verse and speculation, Titus Lucretius. 

This conception of man's destiny as an infinite 
retrogression, Eden receding behind Eden, lost Para- 
dise behind lost Paradise, in the dateless past, en- 
counters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or 
philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of 
humanity from the Baltic to the Indian Sea, from 
the furthest Orient to the Western Isles. Beside 
this radiant past even the vision of the abode which 
awaits the soul at death seems dusky and repellent, 
a land of twilight, as in the Etruscan legend, or that 
dominion over the shades which Achilles loathed 
beyond any mortal misery. 

But the memory or the imagination of this land 
far behind, upon which Heaven's light forever falls, 
the Asgard of the Goths, the Akkadian dream of 
Sin-land ruled by the Yellow Emperor, the reign 
of Saturn and of Ops, diminishes in power and liv- 
ing energy as the ages advance, and, perishing at 
lastj is embalmed in the cold and crystal loveliness 
of poetry. In its place bright mansions, elysian 
groves, await the soul at death. Heaven closes 
around earth like a protecting smile, and from this 
hope of a recovered Paradise and new Edens 
amongst the stars, which to Dante and his time are 



THE DESTINY OF MAN 209 

but the earth's appanage, man advances swiftly to 
the desire, the hope, the certainty of a terrestrial 
Paradise waiting his race in the near or remote 
future. Thus, as the immanence of the Divine 
within the soul of man has deepened, and the desire 
of his heart has grown nearer the desire of the 
world-soul, so has the power of memory decreased 
and been transformed into hope. Man, tossed from 
illusion to illusion, has grown sensitive to the least 
intimations of Reality. 

But these visions of Eden, whether located in a 
remote past, or in the interstellar spaces, or in the 
near future, have certain characteristics in common. 
From far behind to far in front the dream has 
shifted, as if the Northern Lights had moved from 
horizon to horizon, but it remains one dream. The 
earthly Paradise of the social reformer, a Saint- 
Simon or a Fourier, of a world free from war and 
devoted to agriculture and commerce, or of the 
philosophic evolutionist, of a world peopled by my- 
riads of happy altruists bounding from bath to break- 
fast-room, illumined and illumining by their healthy 
and mutual smiles, differs from the earlier fancies 
of Asgard and the Isles of the Blest, not in height- 
ened nobility and reasonableness, but in diminished 
beauty and poetry. The dream of unending prog- 
ress is vain as the dream of unending regress. ^^ 

^^ Yet the scientific conception of the destruction or decay of. 
this whole star-system by fire or ice does of itself turn prog- 
ress into Si mockery. (See Prof. C. A. Young, Manual of 



2IO DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

Critics of literature and philosophy have often 
remarked how sterile are the efforts to delineate 
a state of perfect and long-continued bliss, even 
when a Dante or a Milton undertakes the task, com- 
pared with delineations of torment and endless woe. 
And Aeschylus has remarked, and La Rochefou- 
cauld and Helvetius bear him out, how much easier 
a man finds the effort to sympathise with another's 
misery than to rejoice in his joy. 

Such contrasts are due, not to a faltering imagina- 
tion, nor to the depravity of the human heart. 
They are the recognition by the dark Unconscious, 
which in sincerity of vision ever transcends the 
Conscious, that in man's life truth dwells not with 
felicity, that to the soul imprisoned in Time and 
Space, whether amongst the stars or on this earth, 
perfect peace is a mockery. But in Time, misery 
is the soul's familiar, anguish is the gate of truth, 
and the highest moments of bliss are, as the Socrates 
of Plato affirms, negative. They are the moments 
of oblivion, when the manacles of Time fall off, 
whether from stress of agony or delight or mere 
weariness. Therefore with stammering lips man 
congratulates joy, but the response of grief to grief 
is quick and from the heart, sanctioned by the Un- 
conscious; therefore in the portraiture of Heaven 
art fails, but in that of Hell succeeds. 

It is not in Time that the eternal can find rest, 

Astronomy, p. 571, and Prof. F. R. Moulton, Introduction to 
Astronomy, p. 486.) 



MODERN HISTORY'S FOUR AGES 211 

nor in Space that the infinite can find repose, and as 
illusion follows lost illusion, the soul of man does but 
the more completely realise the wonder ineffable of 
the only reality, the Eternal Now. 

§ 3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY 
AND THEIR IDEALS 

The deepenmg of this conception of man's destiny 
as beginning in the Infinite and in the Infinite 
ending, is one of the profoundest and most signifi- 
cant features of the present age. Its dominion 
over art, literature, religion, can no longer escape 
us. It is the dominant note of the last of the four 
great ages or epochs into which the history of the 
thought of modern Europe, in an ever-ascending 
scale, divides itself. A brief review of these four 
epochs will best prepare us for a consideration of the 
present position of Britain, and of the relations of 
its empire to the actual conditions of Europe and 
humanity. 

The First Age is controlled by the Saintly Ideal. 
The European of that age is a visionary. The un- 
seen world is to him more real than the seen, and 
art and poetry exist but to decorate the pilgrimage 
of the soul from earth to heaven. The New Jeru- 
salem which Tertullian saw night by night descend 
in the sunset; the city of God, whose shining battle- 
ments Saint Augustine beheld gleam through the 
smoke of the world conflagration of the era of 
Alaric and Attila, of Vandal and Goth, Frank and 



212 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

Hun; the Day of Wrath and Judgment which later 
times looked forward to as certainly as to the com- 
ing of spring, are but phases of one pervading as- 
piration, one passioning cry of the soul. 

But the illusion which lures on that age fades 
when the ascetic zeal of the saint is frustrated by 
the joy of life, and the crusader's valour is broken 
on the Moslem lances, and the scholastic's inde- 
fatigable pursuit of a harmonising, a reconciling 
word of reason and of faith, his ardour not less 
lofty than the crusader's to pierce the ever-thicken- 
ing host of doubts, discords, fears, fall all in ruins, 
in accepted defeat or in formulated despair. 

With the Second Age a new illusion arises, the 
Wahn of religious freedom. The ideal which Rome 
taught the world, upon which saint, crusader, and 
scholar built their hopes, turned to ashes — but 
shall not the human soul find the haven of its rest in 
freedom from Rome, in the pure faith of primitive 
times? When the last of the scholastics was being 
silenced by a papal edict and the consciousness of a 
hopeless task, the first of the new scholars was 
ushering in the world-drama of four centuries. 

The world-historic significance of the Reforma- 
tion lies in the effort of the European mind to pierce, 
at least in the sphere of Religion, nearer to the truth. 
The successive phases of this struggle may be com- 
pared to a vast tetralogy, with a Prelude of which 
the actors and setting are Huss and Jerome, the 
Council of Constance and Sigismund, the traitor 



MODERN HISTORY'S FOUR AGES 213 

of traitors, who gave John Huss " the word of a 
king," and Huss, solitary at the stake, when the 
flames wrapped him round, learned the value of 
the word of a king. Martin Luther is the protago- 
nist of the first of the four great dramas that follow. 
Its theme is the consecration of man to sincerity 
in his relations to God. There, even at the hazard 
of death, the tongue shall utter what the heart 
thinks. 

The second drama is named Ignatius Loyola; the 
theme is not less absorbing — " Art thou then so sure 
of the truth and of thy sincerity, O my brother? " 
Whatever his followers may have become, Don 
Inigo remains one of the most baffling enigmas that 
historical psychology offers. From his grave he 
rules the Council, and the Tridentine Decrees are 
the acknowledgment of his unseen sovereignty. 

What tragic shapes arise and crowd the stage of 
the third drama — Thurn, Ferdinand, Tilly, Wallen- 
stein, Richelieu, Gustavus, Conde, Oxenstiern! 
And when the last actors of the fourth drama, the 
conflict between moribund Jesuitism and Protes- 
tantism grown arrogant and prosperous, lay aside 
their masks in the world's great tiring-room of 
death, a new Age in world-history has begun. 

As religious freedom is the Wahn of the Refor- 
mation drama, so it is in political freedom that the 
Eternal Illusion now incarnates itself. Let man be 
free, let man throughout the earth attain the un- 
fettered use of all his faculties, and heaven's light 



214 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

will once more fill all the dark places of the world ! 
This is the new avatar, this the glad tidings which 
announce the French Revolution and the Third Age. 
Of this ideal, the faith in which the French Giron- 
dins die is the most perfect expression. What is 
this faith for which Condorcet and his party perish, 
some by poison, some by the sword, some by the 
guillotine, some in battle, but all by violent deaths 
— Vergniaud, Roland, Barbaroux, Brissot, Barnave, 
Gensonne, Petion, Buzot, Isnard ? " Oh Liberty, 
what crimes are done in thy name ! " was not a re- 
proach, but, in the gladness of the martyr's death 
which consecrated all the life, it was the wonder, 
the disquiet of a moment yet sure of its peace in 
some deeper reconcilement. Behold how strong is 
their faith ! Marie Antoinette has her faith, the in- 
junction of her priest, " When in doubt or in afflic- 
tion, think of Calvary." Yet the hair of the Queen 
whitens, her spirit despairs. The Girondinist queen 
climbing the scaffold, not less a lover of love and of 
life than Marie Antoinette — what nerves her? It 
is the star of the future and the memory of Ver- 
gniaud's phrase, " Posterity ? What have we to do 
with posterity ? Perish our memory, but let France 
be free!" 

How free are their souls, what nobility shines in 
the eyes of these men, light-stepping to their doom, 
immortally serene, these martyrs, witnesses to an 
ideal not less pure, not less lofty than those other 
two for which saint and reformer died ! And their 



MODERN HISTORY'S FOUR AGES 215 

battk-march, which is also their hymn of death: 
Shelley has composed it, the choral chant, the vision 
of the future of the world, which closes Hellas. 

This faith, in which the Girondins live and die 
is the hope, the faith that slowly arises in Europe 
through the eighteenth century, in political freedom 
as the regenerator, as the salvation of the world. 
Voltaire announces the coming of the Third Age — 
" Blessed are the young, for their eyes shall behold 
it" — and upon the ruins of the Bastille Charles 
James Fox sees it arise, " By how much," he writes 
to a friend, " is not this the greatest event in the 
history of the world!" Its presence shakes the 
steadfast heart of Goethe like a reed. Wordsworth, 
Schiller, Chateaubriand pledge themselves its hiero- 
phants — for a time ! The Wahn of freedom, the 
eternal illusion, the dream of the human heart! 
First to France, then to Europe, then to all the earth 
— Freedom ! 

This is the faith for which the Girondins perish, 
and in dying bequeath to the nineteenth century 
the theory of man's destiny which informs its poetry, 
its speculative science, its systematic philosophy. It 
is the faith of Shelley and of Fichte, of Herbart and 
of Comte, of John Stuart Mill, Lassaulx, Quinet, 
not less than of Tennyson, last of the Girondins. 
For the ideal of the Third Age, freedom, knowledge, 
the federation of the world, passes as the ideals of 
the First and of the Second Age pass. Not in po- 
litical any more than in religious freedom could 



2i6 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

man's unrest find a panacea. The new heavens and 
the new earth which Voltaire proclaimed vanished 
like the city which Tertullian saw beyond the sun- 
set. 

And knowledge — of what avail is knowledge ? — 
or to scan the abysses of space and search the 
depths of time? If the utmost dreams of science, 
and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism 
were realised, if the foundations of life and O'f be- 
ing were laid bare, if the curve of every star were 
traced, its laws determined, and its structure an- 
alysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first 
hour, and the annals of all the systems that wheel 
in space, were by some miracle brought within our 
scrutiny — it still would leave the spirit unsatisfied 
as when these crystal walls did first environ its infini- 
tude. 

The defects, the nobility, and the beauty of the 
ideal of the Third Age are conspicuous in the great 
last work of Condorcet. As Mirabeau, the intellec- 
tual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebel- 
lion, that principle which has drawn the deepest ut- 
terances from the world-soul, from Job to Prome- 
theus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose counte- 
nance in its high and gentle benevolence seems the 
very expression of that hienfaisance which the 
Abbe de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be 
styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries 
his faith beyond the grave, hallowing the altar of 
Freedom with his blood. In over a hundred pamph- 



MODERN HISTORY'S FOUR AGES 217 

lets during the four years of his hfe as a Revolution- 
ist, Condorcet disseminates his ideas — fortnightly 
pamphlets, many of them even now worth reading, 
lighting up now this, now that aspect of his faith — 
kingship, slavery, the destiny of man, two Houses, 
assignats, education of the people, finance, the rights 
of man, economics, free trade, the rights of women, 
the Progress of the fluman Mind. It is in this last, 
written with the shadow of death upon him, that 
the central thought of his system is developed. He 
may have derived it from Turgot,^^ his master, and 
the subject of one of his noblest biographies, but 
he gave it a consecration of his own, and later writ- 
ers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or 
reduce to scientific rule and line his hving thought. 
Where they most are faithful, there his followers 
are greatest. 

In the theory of evolution Condorcet' s princi- 
ples appear to find scientific expression and warrant, 
but it is pathetic to observe the speculative science 
of a modern systematiser advancing through volume 
after volume with the cumbrous but massive force 

^■^ Condorcet's biography (1786) of his master is one of the 
noblest works of its class in French literature. Turgot's was 
one of those minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle 
Adam's scatter bounteously the ideas which others use or mis- 
use. The fogs and mists of Comte's portentous tomes are all 
derived, it has often been pointed out, from a few paragraphs 
of Turgot. And a fragment written by Turgot in his youth 
inspired something of the substance and even of the title of 
Condorcet's great Esquisse. 



2i8 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

of a traction-engine, only to find rest at last in a vis- 
ion of Utopia some centuries hence, tedious as the 
Paradise of mediaeval poets or the fabulous Edens 
of earlier times. 

Indeed, the conception of the infinite perfectibil- 
ity of man, and of an eternal progress, carried its 
own doom in the familiar observation that there 
where progress can be traced, there the divine is 
least immanent. A distinguished statesman and 
writer, and a believer in evolution, recently avowed 
his perplexity that an age like the present, which has 
invented steam, electricity, and the kinematograph, 
should in painting and poetry not surpass the Renais- 
sance, nor in scultpure the age of Phidias. In such 
perplexity is it not as if one heard again the threat 
of Mummius, charging his crew to give good heed to 
the statues of Praxiteles, on the peril of replacing 
them if broken! 

Goethe, as the wrecks of his drama on Liberty 
prove, felt the might of the ideal of the Third Age 
with all the vibrating emotion which genius imparts.^^ 

58 References to the power over his mind of the French 
Revolutionary principles abound in Goethe's writings. The 
violence of the first impression, which began with the affair 
of the necklace, had reached a climax in 'go and '91, and this, 
along with the ineffaceable memories of the Werther and 
Goetz period, which his heart remembered when in his intel- 
lectual development he had left it far behind, accounts in a 
large measure for his yielding temporarily at least to the spell 
of Napoleon's genius, and for the studied but unaffected in- 
difference to German politics and to the War of Liberation. 
Even of 1809, the year of Eckmiihl, Essling, and Wagram, 



MODERN HISTORY'S FOUR AGES 219 

But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and 
bade the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric 
or in drama, to seek its peace where he himself had 
found it, in Art. So the labour of the scientific 
theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of 
man's spirit beyond science, brings also a reward 
of its own to the devotee. The sun of Art falls 
in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working ob- 
scurely in words, and then does he most know the 
Unknowable when, in the passion of self-imposed 
ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence in pro- 
claiming its unknowableness. Glimmerings from 
the Eternal visit the obscure study where the soul 
in travail records patiently the incidents of Time, and 
elaborates a theory of man's history as if it were 
framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a 
three-volume novel. 

§ 4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE 

But from those very failures, those dissatisfac- 
tions, the ideal of the Fourth Age is born, and the 
law of a greater progress divined. For the soul, 
revolting at last against the fleeting illusions of time, 
the deceiving Edens of saint, reformer, and revolu- 
tionist, freedom from the body, freedom from re- 

and the darkest hour of German freedom, Goethe can write: 
" This year, considering the beautiful returns it brought me, 
shall ever remain dear and precious to memory," and when 
the final uprising against the French was imminent, he sought 
quietude in oriental poetry — Firdusi, Hafiz, and Nisami, 



220 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

ligious, or freedom from political oppression, sets 
steadily towards the lodestar of its being, whose 
rising is not in Time nor its going down in Space. 
Nor is it in knowledge, whether of the causes of 
things, or of the achievements of statesmen, war- 
riors, legislators, that the peace of the infinite is 
to be found, but in a vision of that which was when 
Time and Cause were not. Then instruction and 
the massed treasures of knowledge, established or 
theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the 
planet on which man plays his part, or of other 
planets on which other forms of being play their 
parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together 
like a scroll. The Timeless, the Infinite, like a burst 
of clear ether, an azure expanse washed of clouds, 
lures on the delighted spirit, tranced in ecstasy. 

For the symbol of this universe and of man's 
destiny is not the prolongation of a line, nor of 
groups of lines organically co-ordinate, but, as it 
were, a sphere shapen from within and moulded by 
that Presence whose immanence, ever intensifying, 
is the Thought which time realises as the Deed. 
Man looks to the future and the coming of Eternity. 
How shall the Eternal come or the Infinite be far 
off? Behold, the Eternal is now, and the Infinite 
is here. And if the high-upreared architecture of 
the stars, and the changing fabric of the worlds, be 
but shadows, and the pageantry of time but a dream, 
yet the dreamer and the dream are God. 

If all be Illusion, yet this faith that all is Illusion 



THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE 221 

can be none. There the realm of Illusion ends, here 
Reality begins. And thus the spirit of man, having 
touched the mother-abyss, arises victorious in defeat 
to fix its gaze at last, steadfast and calm, upon the 
Eternal. 

Such is the distinction of the Fourth Age, whose 
light is all about us, flooding in from the eastern 
windows yonder like a great dawn. Man's spirit, 
tutored by lost illusion after lost illusion, advances 
to an ever deeper reality. The race, too, like the 
individual and the nation, is subject to the Law of 
Tragedy. Once more, in the way of a thousand 
years, it knows that it is not in time, nor in any 
cunning manipulation or extension of the things of 
time, that Man the Timeless can find the word which 
sums his destiny, and spuming the phantoms of 
space, save as they grant access to the Spaceless, 
casts itself back upon God, and in art, thought, and 
action pierces to the Infinite through the finite. 

This mystic attribute, this elan of the soul, dis- 
covers a fellowship in thinkers wide apart in circum- 
stance and mental environment. It is, for instance, 
the trait which Schopenhauer, Tourgenieff,^^ Flau- 
bert, and Carlyle possess in common.^^ These men 

5^ Of his Contes Taine said: "Depuis les Grecs aucun ar- 
tiste n'a taille un camee litteraire avec autant de relief, avec 
une aussi rigoureuse perfection de forme." 

®o It is remarkable that Carlyle and Schopenhauer should 
have lived through four decades together yet neither know in 
any complete way of the other's work. Carlyle nowhere men- 
tions the name of Schopenhauer. Indeed Die Welt als Wille 



222 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

are not as others of their time, but prophet voices 
that announce the Fourth, the latest Age, whose 
dawn has laid its hand upon the eastern hills. 

The restless imagination of Flaubert, fused from 
the blood of the Norsemen, plunges into one period 
after another, Carthage, the Rome of the Caesars, 
Syria, Egypt, and Galilee, the unchanging East, and 
the monotony in change of the West, pursuing the 
one Vision in many forms, the Vision which leads 
on Carlyle from stage to stage of a course curiously 
similar. Flaubert has a wider range and more 
varied sympathies than Carlyle, and in intensity of 
vision occasionally surpasses him. Both are mys- 
tics, visionaries, from their youth ; but in ethics Flau- 
bert seems to attain at a bound the point of view 

und Vorstellung, though read by a few, was practically an un- 
known book both in Germany and England until a date when 
Carlyle was growing old, solitary, and from the present ever 
more detached, and new hooks and new writers had become, 
as they were to Goethe in his age, distasteful or a weariness. 
Schopenhauer, on the other hand, already in the "thirties," 
had been attracted by Carlyle's essays on German literature 
in the Edinburgh, and though ignorant as yet of the writer's 
name he was all his life too diligent a reader of English news- 
papers and magazines to be unaware of Carlyle's later fame. 
But he has left no criticism, nor any distinct references to 
Carlyle's teaching, although in his later and miscellaneous 
writings the opportunity often presents itself. Wagner, it is 
known, was a student both of Schopenhauer and Carlyle. 
Schopenhauer's proud injunction, indeed, that he who would 
understand his writings should prepare himself by a prelimi- 
nary study of Plato or Kant, or of the divine wisdom of the 
Upanishads, indicates also paths that lead to the higher teach- 
ing of Wagner, and — though in a less degree — of Carlyle. 



THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE 223 

which the dragging years alone revealed to Carlyle. 

The chapter on the death of Frederick the Great 
reads like a passage from the Correspondance of 
Flaubert in his first manhood. In Saint Antoine, 
Flaubert found the secret of the same mystic in- 
spiration as Carlyle found in Cromwell. To the 
brooding soul of the hermit, as to that of the war- 
rior of Jehovah, what is earth, what are the shapes 
of time ? Man's path is to the Eternal — dem 
Grahe hinan — and from the study of the Revolu- 
tion of 1848 Flaubert arises with the same embit- 
tered insight as marks the close of " Frederick the 
Great." 

And if, in such later works as Flaubert's Bouvard 
et Pecuchet and the Latter-Day Pamphlets oi Carlyle, 
only the difference between the two minds is appar- 
ent, the difference is, after all, but a difference in 
temperament. It is the contrast between the impas- 
sive aloofness of the artist, and the personal and 
intrusive vehemence of the prophet. 

The structural thought, the essential emotion of 
the two works are the same — the revolt of a soul 
whose impulses are ever beyond the finite and the 
transient, against a world immersed in the finite 
and the transient. Hence the derision, the bitter 
scorn, or the laughter with which they cover the 
pretensions, the hypocrisies, the loud claims of mod- 
ern science and mechanical invention. But whether 
surveyed with contemplative calm, or proclaimed 
with passionate remonstrance to an unheeding gene- 



224 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

ration, the life vision of these two men is one and 
the same — " the eternities, the immensities." ^^ 

And this same passion for the infinite is the in- 
fomiing thought of Wagner's tone-dramas and 
Tschaikowsky's symphonies. Love's mystery is 
deepened by the mystery of death, and its splendour 
has an added touch by the breath of the grave. The 
desire of the infinite greatens the beauty of the finite 
and lights its sanctuary with a supernatural radiance. 
All knowledge there becomes wonder. Truth is not 
known, but the soul is there in very deed possessed 
by the Truth, and is one with it eternally. 

Ibsen's protest against limited horizons, against 
theorists, formulists, social codes, conventions, de- 
rives its justice from the worthlessness of those con- 

^1 The friendship of Tourgenieff and Flaubert rested upon 
speculative rather than on artistic sympathy. The Russian 
indeed never quite understood Flaubert's " rage for the word." 
Yet the deep inner concord of the two natures reveals itself in 
their correspondence. It was the supreme friendship of Flau- 
bert's later manhood as that with Bouilhet was the friendship 
of his earlier years. Yet they met seldom, and their meetings 
often resembled those of Thoreau and Emerson, as described 
by the former, or those of Carlyle and Tennyson, when after 
some three hours' smoking, interrupted by a word or two, the 
evening would end with Carlyle's good-night : " Weel, we 
hae had a grand nicht, Alfred." It is in one of Tourgenieff's 
own prose-poems that the dialogue of the Jungfrau and the 
Finsteraarhorn across the centuries is darkly shadowed. The 
evening of the world falls upon spirits sensitive to its intima- 
tions as the diurnal twilight falls upon the hearts of travellers 
descending a broad stream near the Ocean and the haven of 
its unending rest. 



THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE 225 

ventions, codes, theories, in the light of the infinite. 
The achievements in art most distinctive of the pres- 
ent age — the paintings of Courbet, Whistler, Degas, 
for instance — proclaim the same creative principle, 
the unsubstantiality of substance, the immateriality 
of matter, the mutability of all that seems most fixed, 
the unreality of all things, save that which was once 
the emblem of unreality, the play of line and colour, 
and their impression upon the retina of the eye. 
"HI live to be a hundred, I shall be able to draw a 
line," said Hokousai. It was as if he had said, " I 
shall be able to create a world." 

The pressing effects of Imperialism in such an 
environment, its swift influences upon the life of 
an age thus conditioned, thus sharply defined from 
all preceding ages, are of an import which it would 
be hard to over-estimate. The nation undowered 
with such an ideal, menaced with extinction or with 
a gradual depression to the rank of a protected na- 
tionality, passes easily, as in France and Holland 
and in the higher grades of Russian society, to the 
side of political and commercial indifferentism, of 
artistic or literary cosmopolitanism. 

But to a race dowered with the genius for empire, 
it rescues politics from the taint of local or transient 
designs, and imparts to public affairs and the things 
of State that elevation which was their characteristic 
in the Rome of Virgil and the England of Crom- 
well. For not only the life of the individual, but 
the life of States, is by this conception robed in 



226 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

something of its initial wonder. These, the indi- 
vidual and the State, as we have seen, are but sep- 
arate phases, aspects of one thought, that thought 
which in the Universe is realised. 

And the transformations in man's conception of 
his relations to the divine are in turn fraught with 
consequence to the ideal of imperialism itself. Life 
is greatened. The ardour of the periods of history 
most memorable awakens again in man, the rever- 
ence of the Middle Age, the energy of the Renais- 
sance. A higher mood than that of the England 
of Cromwell has arisen upon the England of to-day. 
Man's true peace is not in the finite, but in the in- 
finite; yet in the finite there is a work to be done, 
with the high disregard of a race which looks, not 
to the judgment of men, but of angels, whose appeal 
is not to the opinion of the world, but of God. 

Here at the close of a century, side by side exist- 
ing are two ideals, one political, the other religious, 
" a divine philosophy of the mind," in Algernon 
Sidney's phrase — how can the issue and event be 
other than auspicious to this empire and to this 
generation of men? As Puritanism seemed born for 
the ideal of Constitutional England, so this ideal of 
the Fourth Epoch seems born to be the faith of Im- 
perial England. Behind Cromwell's armies was the 
faith of Calvin, the philosophy of the " Institutes " ; 
behind the French Revolution the thought of Rous- 
seau and Voltaire; but in this ideal, a thought, a 
speculative vision, deeper, wider in range than Cal- 



THE ACT AND THE THOUGHT 227 

vin's or Rousseau's, is, with every hour that passes, 
adding a serener Hfe, an energy more profound. 

§ 5. THE " ACT " AND THE " THOUGHT " 

Carlyle's exaltation of the " deed " above the 
" word," of action above speech, does not exhaust 
its meaning in setting the man of deeds, the soldier 
or the politician, above the thinker or the artist. 
It is an affirmation of the glory of the sole Actor, 
the Dramatist of the World, the Demiourgos, whose 
actions are at once the deeds and the thoughts of 
men. " Im Anfang war die That." The " deed " 
is nearer the eternal fountain than the " word " ; 
though, on the other hand, in this or that work of 
art there may converge more rays from the primal 
source than in this or that deed. In painting, that 
impressionism which loves the line for the line's sake, 
the tint for the tint's sake, owes its emotion, sincere 
or affected, to the same energy of the same divine 
thought as that from which the baser enthusiasm 
of the subject-painter flows. A consciousness of 
the same truth reveals itself in Wagner's lifelong 
struggle, splendidly heroic, to weld the art of arts 
into living, pulsing union wnth the " deed," the action 
and its setting, from which, in such a work as Tris- 
tan, or as Parsifal, that art's ecstasy or mystery de- 
rives. 

In the great crises of the world the preliminary 
actions have always been indefinite, hesitating, or 
obscure. Indefiniteness is far from proving the 



228 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

insincerity or transiency of Imperialism as an ideal. 
" A man," says Oliver Cromwell, " never goes so far 
as when he does not know whither he is going." 
What Cromwell meant was that, in the great hours 
of life, the supernatural, the illimitable, thrusts 
itself between man and the limited, precise ends 
of common days. Upon such a subject Cromwell 
has the right to speak. Great himself, he was the 
cause of the greatness that was in others. But in 
all things it was still Jehovah that worked in him. 
Deeply penetrated with this belief, Cromwell had 
the gift of making his armies live his life, think his 
thought. Each soldier, horse or foot, was a warrior 
of God. 

Man's severing, isolating intelligence is in these 
moments merged in the divine intelligence; but in 
subjection, then is it most free. The conscious 
is lost in the unconscious force which works behind 
the world. The individual will stands aside. The 
Will of the universe advances. Precision of design 
and purpose are shrouded in that dark background 
of Greek tragedy, on which the forms of gods and 
heroes, in mortal or immortal beauty, were sketched, 
subject in all their doings to this high, dread, and 
austere power. 

So of empires, of races, and of nations. A race 
never goes so far as when it knows not whither it is 
going, when, rising in the consciousness of its des- 
tiny at last, and seeing as yet but a little way in front, 
it advances, performs that task as if it were its final 



THE ACT AND THE THOUGHT 229 

task, as if no other task was reserved for it by time 
or by nature. Consciousness of destiny is the con- 
sciousness of the will of God and of the divine 
purposes. It is the identity of the desire of the race 
with the desire of the world-soul, and it moves 
towards its goal with the motion of tides and of 
planets. 

Therefore when in thought we summon up re- 
membrance of those empires of the past, Assyria, 
Egypt, Babylon, Hellas, Rome, and Islam, or those 
empires of nearer times, Charles's, Napoleon's, 
Akbar's, when we throw ourselves back in imagina- 
tion across the night of time, endeavouring to live 
through their revolutions, and front with each in 
turn the black portals of the future — what image 
is this which of itself starts within the mind? Is 
it not the procession of the gladiators and the amphi- 
theatre of Rome? 

Rome beyond all races had the instinct of tragic 
grandeur in state and public life, and by that instinct 
even her cruelty is at times elevated through the 
pageantry or impressive circumstance amid which 
it is enacted. Does not this vault then, arching 
above us, appear but as a vast amphitheatre? And 
towards the mortal arena the empires of the world, 
one by one, defile past the high-upreared, dark, and 
awful throne where sits Destiny — the phalanx of 
Macedon, the Roman legion, the black banner of 
the Abbassides, the jewelled mail of Akbar's chiv- 



230 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

airy, and the Ottoman's crescent moon. And their 
resolution, serene, implacable, sublime, is the resolu- 
tion of the gladiators, "Ave, imperator, monturi 
te salutant! Hail, Caesar, those about to die salute 
thee!" 

And when the vision sinks, dissolving, and night 
has once more within its keeping cuirass and spear 
and the caparisons of war, the oppressed mind is 
beset as by a heavy sound, gathering up from the 
abysses, deeper, more dread and mysterious than 
the death-march of heroes — the funeral march of 
the empires of the world, the requiem of faiths, dead 
yet not dead, of creeds, institutions, religions, gov- 
ernments, laws — till through Time's shadows the 
Eternal breaks, in silence sweeter than all music, in 
a darkness beyond all light. 

§ 6. Britain's world-mission : the witness 
OF the dead to the mandate of the 

PRESENT 

Yet with a resolution as deep-hearted as the glad- 
iator's it is for another cause and unto other ends 
that the empires of the world have striven, ful- 
filled their destiny and disappeared, that this Em- 
pire of Britain now strives, fulfilling its destiny. 
Fixed in her resolve, the will of God behind her, 
whither is her immediate course? The narrow 
space of the path in front of her that is discernible 
even dimly — whither does it tend or appear to tend ? 

Empires are successive incarnations of the Divine 



BRITAIN'S WORLD MISSION 231 

ideas, and by a principle which, in its universality 
and omnipotence in the frame of Nature, seems it- 
self an attribute of the Divine, the principle of con- 
flict, these ideas reaHse their ends in and through con- 
flict. The scientific form which it assumes in the 
hypothesis of evolution is but the pragmatic expres- 
sion of this mystery. Here is the metaphysical basis 
of the Law of Tragedy, the profoundest law in hu- 
man life, in human art, in human action. And 
thus that law, which, as I pointed out, throws a vivid 
light upon the first essential transformation in the 
life-history of a State dowered with empire, offers 
us its aid in interpreting the last transformation of 
all. 

The higher freedom of man in the world of action, 
and reverie in the domain of thought, are but two 
aspects of the idea which Imperial Britain incar- 
nates, just as Greek freedom and beauty were aspects 
of the idea incarnate in Hellas. 

The spaces of the past are strewn with the wrecks 
of dead empires, as the abysses where the stars 
wander are strewn with the dust of vanished sys- 
tems, sunk without a sound in the havoc of the aeons. 
But the Divine presses on to ever deeper realisa- 
tions, alike through vanished races and through 
vanished universes. 

Britain is laying the foundations of States unborn, 
civilisations undreamed till now, as Rome in the days 
of Tacitus was laying the foundations of States and 
civilisations unknown, and by him darkly imagined. 



212 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

For Justice men turn to the State in which Justice 
has no altar,®^ Freedom no temple; but a higher 
than Justice, and a greater than Freedom, has in 
that State its everlasting seat. Throughout her 
bounds, in the city or on the open plain, in the 
forest or in the village, under the tropic or in the 
frozen zone, her subjects shall find Justice and Free- 
dom as the liberal air, so that enfranchised thus, and 
the unfettered use of all his faculties secured, each 
may fulfil his being's supreme law. 

The highest-mounted thought, the soul's complete 
attainment, like the summits of the hills, can be the 
possession only of the few, but the paths that lead 
thither this empire shall open to the daring climber. 
Humanity has left the Calvinist and Jacobin behind. 
And thus Britain shall become the name of an ideal 
as well as the designation of a race, the description 
of an attitude of mind as well as of traits of blood. 

Europe has passed from the conception of an 
outwardly composed unity of religion and govern- 
ment to the conception of the inner unity which is 
compatible with outward variations in creeds, in 
manners, in religions, in social institutions. Har- 
mony, not uniformity, is Nature's end. 

Dante, as the years advanced and the poet within 
him thrust aside the Ghibelline politician, the author 
of the De Monarchia, discerned this ever more 
clearly. Contemplating the empires of the past, he 
felt the Divine mystery there incarnate as pro- 

82 Cf. Philostratus, Life of AppoUonius. I. 28. 



BRITAIN'S WORLD MISSION 2ZZ 

foundly as Polybius. In the fourteenth century 
he dares to see in the Roman people a race not less 
divinely missioned than the Hebrew. Though con- 
temporary of the generation whose fathers had seen 
the Inquisition founded, yet like an Arab souiij 
Dante, the poet of medisevalism, points to the spot 
of light far-off, insufferably radiant, yet infinitely 
minute, the source and centre of all faiths, all creeds, 
all religions, of this universe itself, and all the de- 
sires of men. In an age which silenced the scholas- 
tics he founded Hell in the Ethics of Aristotle, as 
on a traced plan, and he who in his childhood had 
heard the story of the great defeat, and of the last 
of the crusading kings borne homewards on his 
bier, dares crest his Paradise with the dearest images 
of Arab poetry, the loveliness of flame and the sweet- 
ness of the rose. 

What does this import, unless that already the 
mutual harmonies of the wide earth and of the stars 
had touched his listening soul, that already he who 
stayed to hear Casella sing heard far off a diviner 
music, the tones of the everlasting symphony played 
by the great Musician of the World, the chords 
whereof are the deeds of empires, the achievements 
of the heroes of humanity, and its most mysterious 
cadences are the thoughts, the faiths, the loftiest 
utterances of the mind of man? 

And to the present age, what an exhortation Is 
implicit in this thought of Dante's! No unity, no 
bond amongst men is so strong as that which is 



234 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

based on religion. Patriotism, class prejudices, ties 
of affection, all break before its presence. What a 
light is cast upon the deeper places of the human 
heart by the history of Jesuitism in the seventeenth 
century ! Genius for religion is rare as other forms 
of genius are rare, yet both in the life of the indi- 
vidual and of the State its rank is primary. In 
the soul, religion marks the meridian of the divine. 
By its remoteness from or nearness to this the value 
of all else in life is tested. And there is nothing 
which a race will not more willingly surrender than 
its religion. The race which changes its religion is 
either very young, quick to reverence a greater race, 
and ardent for all experiment, or very old, made 
indifferent by experience or neglectful by. despair. 

In the conception at which she has at last arrived, 
and in her present attitude towards this force, Brit- 
ain may justly claim to represent humanity. She 
combines the utmost reverence for her own faith 
with sympathetic intelligence for the faiths of others. 
And confronting her at this hour of the world's 
history is a task higher than the task of Akbar, and 
more auspicious. Akbar's design was indeed lofty, 
and worthy of that great spirit ; but it was a hopeless 
design. The forms, the creeds which have been im- 
posed from without upon a religion are no integral 
part of that religion's life. Even when by the 
progress of the years they have become transfused 
by the formative influences which time and the suf- 
ferings or the hopes of men supply, they change or 



BRITAIN'S WORLD MISSION 235 

are cast aside without organic convulsion or menace 
to the life itself. But the forms and embodiments 
which a divine thought in the process of its own 
irresistible and mighty growth assumes — these are 
beyond the touch o-f outer things, and evade the 
shaping hand of man. Inseparable from the thought 
which they, as it were, reincarnate, their life changes 
but with its life, and together they recede into the 
divine whence they came. The effort to extract the 
inmost truth, tearing away the form which by an 
obscure yet inviolate process has crystallised around 
it, is like breaking a statue to discover the loveliness 
of its loveliness. Akbar would have as quickly 
reached the creative thought, the idea enshrined in 
the Athene of Phidias, the immortal cause of its 
power, by destroying the form, as have severed the 
divine thought immanent in the Magian or Hindoo 
faiths from their integral embodiments. 

But a greater task awaits Britain. Among the 
races of the earth whos.e fate is already dependent, 
or within a brief period will be dependent upon 
Europe, what empire is to aid them, moving with 
nature, to attain that harmony which Dante dis- 
cerned? What empire, disregarding the mediaeval 
ideal, the effort to impose upon them systems, rites, 
institutions, creeds, to which they are by nature, 
by their history, by inherited pride in the traditions 
of the past, hostile or invincibly opposed, will ad- 
venture the new, the loftier enterprise of develop- 
ment all that is permanent and divine within their 



236 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

own civilisations, institutions, rites, and creeds? 
Nature and the dead shall lend their unseen but 
mighty alliance to such purposes! Thus will Brit- 
ain turn to the uses of humanity the valour or the 
fortune which has brought the religions of India 
and the power of Islam beneath her sway. 

The continents of the world no longer contain 
isolated races severed from each other by the bar- 
riers of nature, mutual ignorance, or the artifices 
of man, but vast masses, moving into ever-deepening 
intimacies, imitations, mutually influenced and influ- 
encing. Man grows conscious to himself as one, 
and to represent this consciousness on the round 
earth, as Rome did once represent it on this half the 
world, to be amongst the races of all the earth what 
Hildebrand dreamed the Normans might be amongst 
the nations of Europe, is not this a task exalted 
enough to quicken the most sluggish zeal, the most 
retrogfade " patriotism " ? For without such medi- 
ation, misunderstanding, envy, hate, mistrust still 
erect barriers between the races of mankind more 
impassable than continents or seas or the great wall 
of Ch'in Chi. This is a part not for the future 
merely, it is one to which Britain is already by her 
past committed. The task is great, for between 
civilisation and barbarism, the vanguard and the 
rearguard of humanity, suspicion, rivalry, and war 
are undying. From this the Greek division of man- 
kind into Hellenes and Barbarians derives whatever 
justice it possesses. 



BRITAIN'S WORLD MISSION 237 

In those directions and towards those high endeav- 
ours amongst the subjects within her own dominion, 
and thence amongst the races and rehgions of the 
world, the short space that is illumined of the path 
in front of Britam does unmistakably lead. Every 
year, every month that passes, is fraught with im- 
port of the high and singular destiny which awaits 
this realm, this empire, and this race. The actions, 
the purposes of other empires and races, seem but to 
illustrate the actions, the purposes of this empire, 
and the distinction of its relations to Humanity. 

Faithful to her past, in conflict for this high cause, 
if Britain fall, it will at least be as that hero of the 
Iliad fell, " doing some memorable thing." Were 
not this nobler than by overmuch wisdom to incur 
the taunt, propter vitam vivendi perdere causas, or 
that cast by Dante at him who to fate's summons 
returned " the great refusal," a Dio spiacenti ed 
a-nemici sui, " hateful to God and to the enemies of 
God " ? The nations of the earth ponder our action 
at this crisis, and by our vacillation or resolution 
they are uplifted or dejected; whilst, in their invis- 
ible abodes, the spirits of the dead of our race are 
in suspense till the hazard be made and the glorious 
meed be secured, in triumph or defeat, to eternity. 

There are crises in history when it is not merely 
fitting to remember the dead. Their deeds live with 
us continually, and are not so much things remem- 
bered, as integral parts of our life, moulding the 
thought of every hour. In such crises a Senate 



238 DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN 

of the dead were the truest counsellors of the living, 
for they alone could with convincing eloquence plead 
the cause of the past and of the generations that 
are not yet. Warriors, crusaders, patriots, states- 
men-soldiers or statesmen-martyrs, it was for things 
which are not yet that they died, and to an end 
which, though strongly trusting, they but dimly dis- 
cerned that they laid the foundations of this Em- 
pire. Masters of their own fates, possessors of 
their own lives, they gave them lightly as pledges 
unredeemed, and for men and things of which they 
were not masters or possessors. But they set higher 
store on glory than on life, and valued great deeds 
above length of days. They loved their country, 
dying for it, yet did it seem as if it were less for 
England than for that which is the excellence of 
man's life and the very emergence of the divine 
within such life, that they fought and fell. And 
this great inheritance of fame and of valour is but 
ours on trust, the fief inalienable of the dead and of 
the generations to come. 

And now, behold from their martyr graves Rus- 
sell, Sidney, Eliot arise, and with phantom fingers 
beckon England on! From the fields of their fate 
and their renown, see Talbot and Falkland, Wolfe 
and de Mont fort arise, regardful of England and her 
action at this hour. And lo! gathering up from 
the elder centuries, a sound like a trumpet-call, clear- 
piercing, far-borne, mystic, ineffable, the call to 
battle of hosts invisible, the mustering armies of 



BRITAIN'S WORLD MISSION 239 

the dead, the great of other wars — Brunanburh 
and Senlac, Cregy, Flodden, Blenheim and Trafal- 
gar. Their battle-cries await our answer — the 
chivalry's at Agincourt, " Heaven for Harry, Eng- 
land and St. George ! ", Cromwell's war-shout, which 
was a prayer, at Dunbar, "The Lord of Hosts! 
The Lord of Hosts ! " — these await our answer, that 
response which by this war we at last send ringing 
down the ages, " God for Britain, Justice and Free- 
dom to the world ! " 

Such witness of the dead is both a challenge and 
a consolation; a challenge, to guard this heritage 
of the past with the chivalry of the future, nor bate 
one jot of the ancient spirit and resolution of our 
race; a consolation, in the reflection that from a 
valour at once so remote and so near a degenerate 
race can hardly spring. 

With us, let me repeat, the decision rests, with 
us and with this generation. Never since on Sinai 
God spoke in thunder has mandate more imperative 
been issued to any race, city, or nation than now to 
this nation and to this people. And, again, if we 
should hesitate, or if we should decide wrongly, it 
is not the loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed 
bounds we have to fear, it is the judgment of the 
dead and the despair of the living, of the inarticu- 
late myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraign- 
ing eyes of the unborn. 



PART III 

NINTEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 
A Survey of Political Events and Tendencies 



- CHAPTER VIII - 

§ I. DOMINION OF THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY 

In Europe, as the year 1800 dragged to its bloody- 
close, and the fury of the conflict between the 
Monarchies and the Revolution was for a time stilled 
on the fields of Marengo and Hohenlinden, men 
then, as now, discussed the problems of the relation 
of a century's end to the determining forces of hu- 
man history; then, as now, men remarked half re- 
gretfully, half mockingly, how pallid had grown the 
light which once fell from the years of Jubilee of 
mediaeval or Hebrew times ; and then, as now, critics 
of a lighter or more positive vein debated the ques- 
tion whether the coming year were the first or sec- 
ond of the new century, pointing out that between 
the last year of a century and man's destiny there 
could be no intimate connection, that all the eras 
were equally arbitrary, equally determined by local 
or accidental calculations, that the century which 
was closing over the Christian world had but run 
half its course to the Mohammedan. Yet in one 
deep enough matter the mood of the Europe of 1800 
differs significantly from the mood of the Europe 
of 1900. Whatever the division in men's minds as 

243 



244 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

to the relation between the close of the century and 
a race's history, and the precise moment at which the 
old century ends and the new begins, one thing 
in 1800 was radiantly clear to all men — the glory 
and the wonder, the endless peace and felicity not 
less endless, which the opening century and the new 
age dimly portended or securely promised to hu- 
manity. The desert march of eighteen hundred 
years was ended; the promised land was in sight. 
The poet's voice from the Cumberland hills, " Bliss 
was it in that dawn to be alive " traversed the North 
Sea, and beyond the Rhine was swelled by a song 
more majestic and not less triumphant : 

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen, 
Dutch des Himmels pracht'gen Plan, 
Wandelt, Briider, eure Bahn, 
Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen, 

and, passing the Alps and the Vistula, died in a 
tumultuous hymn of victory long hoped for, of joy 
long desired, of freedom long despaired of, in the 
cities of Italy, the valleys of Greece, the plains of 
Poland, and the Russian steppes. Since those days 
three generations have arisen, looked their last upon 
the sun, and passed to their rest, and in what another 
mood does Europe now confront the opening cen- 
tury and the long vista to its years! Man presents 
himself no more as he was delineated by the poets 
of 1800. Not now does man appear to the poet's 
vision as mild by sufifering and by freedom strong. 



THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY 245 

rising like some stately palm on the century's verge ; 
but to the highest-mounted minds in Russia, Ger- 
many, France, Norway, Italy, man presents himself 
like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, totter- 
ing on the brink of the abyss, whilst far below rave 
the darkness and the storm-drift of the worlds. 
From what causes and by the operation of what laws 
has the great disillusion fallen upon the heart of 
Europe? Whither are vanished the glorious hopes 
with which the century opened ? Is it final despair, 
this mood in which it closes, or is it but the tempo- 
rary eclipse which hides some mightier hope, a new 
incarnation of the spirit of the world, some yet se- 
rener endeavour, radiant and more enduring, wider 
in its range and in its influences pro founder than 
that of 1789, of 1793, or of the year of Hohenlinden 
and Marengo ? 

In the year 1 800, from the Volga to the Irish Sea, 
from the sunlit valleys of Calabria to the tormented 
Norwegian fiords, there was in every European 
heart capable of interests other than egoistical and 
personal one word, one hope, ardent and unconquer- 
able. That word was " Freedom " — freedom to 
the serf from the fury of the boyard, to the thralls 
who toiled and suffered throughout the network of 
principalities, kingdoms, and duchies, named " Ger- 
many " ; freedom to the negro slave ; freedom to the 
newer slaves whom factories were creating ; freedom 
to Spain from the Inquisition, from the tyranny and 
shame of Charles IV and Godoy ; freedom to Greece 



246 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

from the yoke of the Ottoman; to Italy from the 
slow, unrelenting oppression of the Austrian; free- 
dom to all men from the feudal State and the 
feudal Church, from civic injustice and political 
disfranchisement, from the immeasurable wrongs of 
the elder centuries! A new religion, heralded by 
a new evangel, that of Diderot and Montesquieu, 
Lessing, Beccaria, and Voltaire, and sanctified by 
the blood of new martyrs, the Girondins, offered 
itself to the world. But as if man, schooled by 
disillusionment, and deceived in the fifteenth and 
in the seventeenth centuries, trembled now lest this 
new hope should vanish like the old, he sought a 
concrete symbol and a reasoned basis for the intoxi- 
cating dream. Therefore, he spoke the word 
" Liberty " like a challenge, and as sentinel answers 
sentinel, straight there came the response, whispered 
in his own breast, or boldly uttered — " France and 
Bonaparte." Since the death of Mohammed, no 
single life had so centred upon itself the deepest 
hopes and aspirations of men of every type of genius, 
intellect, and character. Chateaubriand, returning 
from exile, offers him homage, and in the first year 
of the century dedicates to him his Genie du Chris- 
tianisme, that work which, after La Nouvelle Helo- 
'ise, most deeply moulded the thought of France in 
the generation which followed. And in that year, 
Beethoven throws upon paper, under the name 
" Bonaparte," the first sketches of his mighty sym- 
phony, the serenest achievement in art, save the 



THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY 247 

Prometheus of Shelley, that the Revolutionary epoch 
has yet inspired. In that year, at Weimar, Schiller, 
at the height of his enthusiasm, is repelled, as he 
had been in the first ardour of their friendship, by 
the aloofness or the disdain of the greater poet. 
Yet Goethe did most assuredly feel even then the 
spell of Napoleon's name. And in that year, the 
greatest of English orators, Charles James Fox, 
joined with the Russian Czar, Paul, with Canova, 
the most exquisite of Italian sculptors, and with 
Hegel, the most brilliant of German metaphysicians, 
in offering the heart's allegiance to this sole man for 
the hopes his name had kindled in Europe and in 
the world. To the calmer devotion of genius was 
added the idolatrous enthusiasm of the peoples of 
France, Italy, Germany. And, indeed, since Mo- 
hammed, no single mind had united within itself 
capacities so various in their power over the imagina- 
tions of men — an energy of will, swift, sudden, 
terrifying as the eagle's swoop; the prestige of deeds 
which in his thirtieth year recalled the youth of 
Alexander and the maturer actions of Hannibal and 
Caesar; an imaginative language which found for 
his ideas words that came as from a distance, like 
those of Shakespeare or Racine; and within his own 
heart a mystic faith, deep-anchored, immutable, 
tranquil, when all around was trouble and disarray 
— the calm of a spirit habituated to the Infinite, and 
familiar with the deep places of man's thought from 
his youth upwards. Yes, Mirabeau was long dead. 



248 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

and Danton, Marat, and Saint- Just, and but three 
years ago the heroic Lazare Hoche, richly gifted in 
poHtics as in war, had been struck down in the noon- 
tide of his years; but now a greater than Mirabeau, 
Hoche, or Danton was here. H the December sun 
of HohenHnden diverted men's minds to Moreau, 
the victor, it was but for a moment. In the uni- 
versal horror and joy with which on Christmas Day, 
1800, the rumour of the explosion and failure of the 
infernal machine in the Rue St. Nicaise spread over 
Europe, men felt more intimately, more consciously, 
the hopes, the fears, bound up inextricably with the 
name, the actions, and the life of the new world-de- 
liverer, the Consul Bonaparte. 

The history of the nineteenth century centres in 
the successive transformations of this ideal so 
highly-pitched. In the gradual declension of the 
cause which was then a religion, and to mankind the 
warrant of a new era, into a local or party-cry, a 
watchword travestied and degraded, lies the origin 
of the intellectual despair or solicitude which marks 
the closing years of the century. The first disil- 
lusionment came swiftly. Fifteen years pass, years 
of war and convulsion unexampled in Europe since 
the cataclysm of the fifth century, the century of 
Alaric and Attila — and within that space, those 
fifteen years, what a revolution in all the sentiments, 
the hopes, the aspirations of men! The Consul 
Bonaparte has become the Emperor Napoleon, the 
arch-enemy of Liberty and of the human race. 



THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY 249 

France, the world's forlorn hope in 1800, is, in 18 15, 
the gathering place of the armies of Europe, risen in 
arms against her! Emperors and kings, nations, 
cities, and principalities, statesmen like Stein, philos- 
ophers like Fichte, poets like Arndt and Korner, 
warriors like Kutusov, Bliicher, and Schwarzten- 
berg, the peoples of Europe and the governments of 
Europe, the oppressed and the oppressors, the em- 
bittered enmities and the wrongs of a thousand years 
forgotten, had leagued together in this vast enter- 
prise, whose end was the destruction of one nation 
and one sole man — the world-deliverer of but 
fifteen years ago ! 

What tragedy of a lost leader equals this of Napo- 
leon? What marvel that it still troubles the minds 
of men more profoundly than any other of modern 
ages. Yet Napoleon did not betray Liberty, nor 
was France false to the Revolution. Man's action 
at its highest is, like his art, symbolic. To Camille 
Desmoulins and the mob behind him the capture of 
a disused fortress and the liberation of a handful of 
men made the fall of the Bastille the s)nTibol and 
the watch-word of Liberty. To the Europe of 
Napoleon, the monarchs of Russia, Austria, Prussia, 
and Spain, the princes of Germany and Italy, the 
Papal power, " the stone thrust into the side of Italy 
to keep the wound open " — these were like the Bas- 
tille to the France of Desmoulins, a symbol of op- 
pression and wrong, injustice and tyranny. And 
in Bonaparte, whether as Consul or Emperor, the 



250 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

peoples of Europe for a time beheld the hero who 
led against the tyrants the hosts of the free. What 
were his own despotisms, his own rigour, his cruelty, 
the spy-system of Fouche, the stifled Press, the 
guet-apens of Bayonne, the oppression of Prussia, 
and one sanguinary war followed by another — 
what were these things but the discipline, the neces- 
sary sacrifice, the martyrdom of a generation for the 
triumph and felicity of the centuries to come? 
Napoleon at the height of Imperial power, with 
thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and 
legions unequalled since those of Rome, did but 
make Rousseau's experiment. " The emotions of 
men," Rousseau argued, '^ have by seventeen hun- 
dred years of asceticism and Christianism been so 
disciplined, that they can now be trusted to their 
own guidance." The hour of his death, whether by 
a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, 
was also the hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into 
the human heart. That hour of penetrating vision 
into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into 
the silence and the darkness. Napoleon, trusting to 
the word and to the ideal Liberty, to man's unstable 
desires and to his own most fixed star, yokes France 
in 1800 to his chariot wheels. But at the outset he 
has to compromise with the past of France, with the 
ineradicable traits of the Celtic race, its passion for 
the figures on the veil of Maya, its rancours, and the 
meditated vengeance for old defeats. Yet it is in 
the name of Liberty rather than of France that he 



THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY 251 

greets the sun of Austerlitz, breaks the ramrod 
despotism of Prussia, and meets the awful resistance 
of the Slav at Eylau and Friedland. Then, turning 
to the West, it is in the name of Liberty that he 
sends Junot, Marmont, Soult, and Massena across 
the Pyrenees to restore honour and law to Spain, 
and, as he had ended the mediaeval Empire of the 
Hapsburgs, to end there in Madrid the Inquisi- 
tion and the priestly domination. The Inquisition, 
which in 300 years had claimed 300,000 victims, is 
indeed suppressed, but Spain, to his amazement, is 
in arms to a man against its liberators ! But Napo- 
leon cannot pause, his fate, like Hamlet's, calling 
out, and whilst his Marshals are still baffled by the 
lines of Torres Vedras, he musters his hosts, and, 
conquering the new Austrian Empire at Wagram, 
marches Attila-like across a subjugated Europe 
against the Empire and capital of the White Czar. 

Napoleon's fall made the purpose of his destiny 
clear even to the most ardent of French Royalists, 
and to the most contented of the servants of Francis 
II or Frederick William III. At Vienna the gaily- 
plumaged diplomatists undid in a month all that 
the fifteen years of unparalleled action and suffering 
unparalleled had achieved; whilst the most matter- 
of-fact of all British Cabinets invested the prison 
of the fallen conqueror with a tragic poetry which 
made the rock in the Atlantic but too fitting an 
emblem of the peak in the Caucasus and the linger- 
ing anguish of Prometheus. And if not one man of 



252 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

supreme genius then living or in after ages has 
condemned Napoleon, if the poets of that time, 
Goethe and Manzoni, Poushkine, Byron, and Ler- 
montoff, made themselves votaries of his fame, it 
was because they felt already what two generations 
have made a commonplace, that his hopes had been 
their hopes, his disillusion their disillusion; that 
in political freedom no more than in religious free- 
dom can the peace of the world be found; that 
Girondinism was no final evangel; that to man's 
soul freedom can never be an end in itself, but only 
the means to an end. 

The history of Europe for the thirty-three years 
following the abdication at the Elysee is a conflict 
between the two principles of Absolutism and 
Liberty, represented now by the cry for constitu- 
tionalism and the Nation, now by a return to Giron- 
dinism and the watchword of Humanity. In theory 
the divine right of peoples was arrayed against the 
divine right of kings. The conflict was waged bit- 
terly; yet it was a conflict without a battle. The 
dungeon, the torture chamber, the Siberian mine, 
the fortress of Spandau or Spielberg, which Silvio 
Pellico has made remembered — these were the 
weapons of the tyrants. The secret society, the 
Marianne, the Carbonari, the offshoots of the 
Tugendbund, the ineffectual rising or transient 
revolution, always bloodily repressed, whether in 
Italy, Spain, Russia, Austria, or Poland — these 
were the sole weapons left to Liberty, which had 



THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY 253 

once at its summons the legions of Napoleon. And 
in this singular conflict, what leaders ! In Spain, the 
heroic Juan Martin, the brilliant Riego ; in Germany, 
Gorres, the morning-star of political journalism, 
Rodbertus or Borne; in France, Saint-Simon, and 
the malcontents who still believed in the Bonapartist 
cause. It was not an army, but a crowd, without 
unity of purpose and without the possibility of 
united action. Opposed to these were the united 
purposes, moved, for a time at least, by a single aim 
— the repression of the common enemy, " Revolu- 
tion," in every State of Europe, in the great 
monarchies of Austria, France, Russia, as in the 
smaller principalities of Germany, the kingdom of 
the Two Sicilies, Tuscany, Piedmont, Venetia, and 
Modena. To this war against Liberty the Czar 
Alexander, the white angel who, in Madame de 
Kriidener's phrase, had struck down the black angel 
Napoleon, added something of the sanctity of a 
crusade. From God alone was the sovereign power 
of the princes of the earth derived, and it was the 
task of the Holy Alliance to compel the peoples to 
submit to this divinely-appointed and righteous des- 
potism. 

In this crusade Austria and Mettemich occupy in 
Europe till 1848 the place which France and Bona- 
parte had occupied in the earlier crusade. " I was 
born," says Mettemich in the fragment of his auto- 
biography, " to be the enemy of the Revolution." 
Nature, indeed, and the environment of his youth 



254 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

had formed him to act the part of the genius of Re- 
action. Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask 
of the Austrian noble lay a heart which had never 
quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high 
with any generous impulse. He was hostile to no- 
bihty of thought, action, and art, for he had intelli- 
gence enough to discern in these a living satire upon 
himself, his life, his aims. He despised history, for 
history is the tragedy of Humanity; and he mocked 
at philosophy. But he patronised Schlegel, for his 
watery volumes were easy reading, and made rebel- 
lion seem uncultured and submission the mark of a 
thoughtful mind. Metternich's handsome figure, 
fine manners, and interminable billets-doux written 
between sentences of death, exile, the solitary dun- 
geon, distinguish his appearance and habits from 
Philip n of Spain, but, like him, he governed Europe 
from his bureau, guiding the movements of a stand- 
ing army of 300,000 men, and a police and espionage 
department never surpassed and seldom rivalled in 
the western world. There was nothing in him that 
was great. But he was indisputable master of 
Europe for thirty-three years. Nesselrode, Harden- 
berg, Talleyrand even — whose Memoirs seem the 
work of genius beside the beaten level of mediocrity 
of Metternich's — found their designs checked 
whenever they crossed the Austrian's policy. 
Congress after Congress — Vienna, Carlsbad, Trop- 
pau, Laybach, Verona — exhibited his triumph to 



THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY 255 

Europe, At Laybach, in 1821, the Emperor's ad- 
dress to the professors there, and thence to all the 
professors throughout the Empire, was dictated by 
Metternich — " Hold fast by what is old, for that 
alone is good. If our forefathers found in this the 
true path, why should we seek another ? New ideas 
have arisen amongst you, principles which I, your 
Emperor, have not sanctioned, and never will sanc- 
tion. Beware of such ideas! It is not scholars I 
stand in need of, but of loyal subjects to my Crown, 
and you, you are here to train up loyal subjects to 
me. See that you fulfil this task!" Is there in 
human history a document more blasting to the repu- 
tation for political wisdom or foresight of him who 
penned it ? It were an insult to the great Florentine 
to style such piteous ineptitudes Machiavellian. Yet 
they succeeded. The new evangel had lost its 
power; the freedom of Humanity was the dream of 
a few ideologues; the positive ideals of later times 
had not yet arisen. Well might men ask themselves : 
Has then Voltaire lived in vain, and the Girondins 
died in vain? Has all the blood from Lodi and 
Areola to Austerlitz and the Borodino been shed in 
vain ? Hard on the address to the universities there 
crept silently across Europe the message that Napo- 
leon was dead. " It is not an event," said Talley- 
rand, " but a piece of news." The remark was just. 
Europe seemed now one vast Sainte Helene, and 
men's hearts a sepulchre in which all hope or desire 



256 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

for Liberty was vanquished. The solitary grave at 
Longwood, the iron raiHngs, the stunted willow, 
were emblems of a cause for ever lost. 

The Revolution of July lit the gloom with a mo- 
ment's radiance. Heine's letters still preserve the 
electric thrill which the glorious Three Days awak- 
ened. " Lafayette, the tricolour, the Marseillaise! " 
he writes to Varnhagen, when the " sunbeams 
wrapped in printer's ink " reached him in Heligo- 
land, " I am a child of the Revolution, and seize 
again the sacred weapons. Bring flowers! I will 
crown my head for the fight of death. Give me the 
lyre that I may sing a song of battle, words like fiery 
stars which shoot from Heaven and burn up palaces 
and illumine the cabins of the poor." But when 
Lafayette presented to France that best of all pos- 
sible Republics, the fat smile and cotton umbrella 
of Louis Philippe; when throughout Italy, Sicily, 
Spain, Germany, insurrection was repressed still 
more coldly and cruelly; when Paskievitch estab- 
lished order in Warsaw, and Czartoryski resigned 
the struggle — then the transient character of the 
outbreak was visible. France herself was weary of 
the illusion. " We had need of a sword," a Polish 
patriot wrote, " and France sent us her tears." The 
taunt was as foolish as it was unjust. France as- 
suredly had done her part in the war for Liberty. 
The hour had come for the States of Europe to work 
out their own salvation, or resign themselves to 
autocracy, Jesuitism, a gagged Press, the omnipres- 



MODERN REPUBLICANISM 257 

ent spy, the Troubetskoi ravelin, Spandau, and Met- 
ternich. 

Eighteen years were to pass before action, but 
it was action for a more limited and less glorious, if 
more practical, ideal than the freedom of the world. 
Other despots died — Alexander I in 1825, the two 
Ferdinands, of Sicily and of Spain, Francis II him- 
self in 1835, and Frederick William III in 1840. 
Gentz, too, was dead, Talleyrand, Hardenberg, and 
Pozzo di Borgo; but Metternich lived on — "the 
gods," as Sophocles avers, " give long lives to the 
dastard and the dog-hearted." The Revolution of 
July seemed but a test of the stability of the fabric 
he had reared. From Guizot and his master he 
found but little resistance. The new Czar Nicholas 
fell at once into the Austrian system; and, with 
Gerlach as Minister, Prussia offered as little resist- 
ance as the France of Guizot. Meanwhile, in 1840, 
by the motion of Thiers, Napoleon had returned 
from Saint Helena, and the advance of his coffin 
across the seas struck a deeper trouble into the des- 
pots of Europe than the march of an army. 

§ 2. NATIONALITY AND MODERN REPUBLICANISM 

In the political as in the religious ideals of men 
transformation is endless and unresting. The mo- 
ment of collision between an old and a new principle 
of human action is a revolution. Such a turning- 
point is the movement which finds its climax in 



258 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

Europe in the year 1848. Two forces there present 
themselves, hostile to each other, yet indissolubly 
united in their determining power upon modern as 
opposed to ancient Republicanism — the principle 
of Nationality and the principle of the organisation 
of Labour against Capital, which under various ap- 
pellations is one of the most profoundly significant 
forces of the present age. The freedom of the 
nation was the form into which the older ideal of 
the freedom of man had dwindled. Saint-Simon- 
ianism preserved for a time the old tradition. But 
the devotees of Saint-Simon's greatest work, Le 
Nouveau Christianisme, after anticipating in their 
banquets, graced sometimes by the presence of Mali- 
bran, the glories of the coming era, quarrelled 
amongst themselves, and, returning to common life, 
became zealous workers not for humanity, but for 
France, for Germany, or for Italy. Patriotism was 
taking the place of Humanism, 

To Lamartine, indeed, and to Victor Hugo, as to 
cultured Liberalism throughout Europe, the incidents 
in Paris of February, 1848, and the astounding 
rapidity with which the spirit of Revolutions sped 
from the Seine to the Vistula, to the Danube and 
the frontiers of the Czar — the barricades in the 
streets of Vienna and Berlin, the flight of the Em- 
peror and the hated Metternich, the Congress at 
Prague, and all Hungary arming at the summons 
of Kossuth, the daring proclamation of the party of 
Roumanian unity — appeared as a glorious continu- 



MODERN REPUBLICANISM 259 

ance, or even as an expansion, of the ideals of 1789 
and 1792. Louis Napoleon, entering like the cut- 
purse King in Hamlet, who stole a crown and put it 
in his pocket, the flight of Kossuth, the surrender or 
the treason of Gorgei, the coup d'etat of December, 
1 85 1, shattered these airy imaginings. Yet Napo- 
leon III understood at least one aspect of the change 
which the years had brought better than the 
rhetorician of the Girondins or the poet of Hernani. 
For the principle of Nationality, which in 1848 they 
ignored, became the foundation of the second 
French Empire, of the unity of Italy, and of that 
new German Empire which, since 1870, has affected 
the State system of Europe more potently and con- 
tinuously than any other single event since the sud- 
den unity of Spain under Ferdinand at the close of 
the fifteenth century. It was his dexterous and 
lofty appeal to this same principle which gave the 
volumes of Palacky's History of Bohemia a power 
like that of a war-song. Nationality did not die in 
Vienna before the bands of Windischgratz and Jel- 
lachlich, and from his exile Kossuth guided its 
course in Hungary to a glorious close — the Magyar 
nation. Even in Russia, then its bitter enemy, this 
principle quickened the ardour of Pan-Slavism, 
which the war of 1878 — the Schipka Pass, Plevna, 
the dazzling heroism of Skobeleff — has made 
memorable. In the triumph of this same principle 
lies the future hope of Spain. Spain has been ex- 
hausted by revolution after revolution, by Carlist in- 



26o NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

trigue, by the arrogance of successive dictators, and 
by the bloody reprisals of faction; she has lost the 
last of her great colonies; but to Alphonso XIII fate 
seems to reserve the task of completing again by 
mutual resignation that union with Portugal of 
which Castelar indicated the basis — a common 
blood and language, the common graves which are 
their ancient battle-fields, and the common wars 
against the Moslem, which are their glory. 

With the names of Marx and Lassalle is 
associated the second great principle which, in 1848, 
definitely takes its place on the front of the Euro- 
pean stage. This is the principle whose votaries 
confronted Lamartine at the Hotel-de-Ville on the 
afternoon of the 25th February. The famous sen- 
tence, fortunate as Danton's call to arms, yet by its 
touch of sentimentality marking the distinction be- 
tween September, 1792, and February, 1848, "The 
tricolour has made the tour of the world; the red 
flag but the tour of the Champ de Mars," has been 
turned into derision by subsequent events. The 
red flag has made the tour of the world as effec- 
tively as the tricolour and the eagles of Bonaparte. 
The origins of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, 
Nihilsm — for all four, however, diverging or antag- 
onistic in the ends they immediately pursue, spring 
from a common root — have been variously ascribed 
in France to the work of Louis Blanc, Fourier, 
Proudhon, or in Germany to Engels, Stirner, and 
Rodbertus, or to the countless secret societies which 



MODERN REPUBLICANISM 261 

arose in Spain, Italy, Austria, and Russia, as a pro- 
test against the broken pledges of kings and govern- 
ments after the Congress of Vienna. But the prin- 
ciple which informs alike the writings of individual 
thinkers and agitators, though deriving a peculiar 
force in the first half of the century from the doc- 
trines and teachings of Fichte and Schleiermacher, 
is but the principle to which in all ages suffering 
and wrong have made their vain appeal — the re- 
sponsibility of all for the misery of the many and 
the enduring tyranny of the few. Indignant at 
the spectacle, the Nihilist in orthodox Russia ap- 
plies his destructive criticism to all institutions, civil, 
religious, political, and finding all hollow, seeks to 
overwhelm all in one common ruin. The Emanci- 
pation of 1 86 1 was to the Nihilist but the act of 
Tyranny veiling itself as Justice. It left the serf, 
brutalised by centuries of oppression, even more 
completely than before to the mercy of the boyard 
and the exploiters of human souls. Michel Bakou- 
nine, Kropotkine, Stepniak, Michaelov, and Sophia 
Perovskaya, whose handkerchief gave the signal to 
the assassins of Alexander II, were but actualisa- 
tions of Tourgenieff's imaginary hero Bazaroff, and 
for a time, indeed, Bazarofhsm was in literary 
jargon the equivalent of Nihilism. If at intervals 
in recent years a shudder passes across Europe at 
some new crime, attempted or successful, of Anar- 
chy, if Europe notes the singular regularity with 
which the crime is traced to Italy, and is perplexed 



262 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

at the absence of all the usual characteristics of con- 
spiracy against society — for what known motives 
of human action, vanity or fear, hope or the gratifi- 
cation of revenge, can explain the silence of the con- 
federates of Malatesta, and the blind obedience of the 
agents of his will? — if Europe is perplexed at this 
apparition of a terror unknown to the ancient world, 
the Italian sees in it but the operation of the law of 
responsibility. To the nameless sufferings of Italy 
he ascribes the temper which leads to the mania 
of the anarchist; and the sufferings of Italy in their 
morbid stage he can trace to the betrayal of Italy 
by Europe in 1816, in 1821, in 1831, in 1848, and 
supremely in 1856. As Europe has grown more 
conscious of its essential unity as one State system, 
diplomacy has wandered from such conceptions as 
the Balance of Power, through Gortschakoff's ironic 
appeal to the equality of kings, to the derisive theory 
of the Concert of Europe. But Communism and 
Anarchism have afforded a proof of the unity of 
Europe more convincing and more terrible, and full 
of sinister presage to the future. 

A third aspect of this revolt of misery is Social- 
ism. Karl Marx may be regarded as the chief ex- 
ponent, if not the founder, of cosmopolitan or inter- 
national Socialism, and Lassalle as the actual 
founder of the national or Democi-atic Socialism of 
Germany. Marx, whose countenance with its 
curious resemblance to that of the dwarf of Velas- 
quez, Sebastian de Morra, seems to single him out 



MODERN REPUBLICANISM 263 

as the apostle and avenger of human degradation 
and human suffering, published the first sketch of 
his principles in 1847, but more completely in the 
manifesto adopted by the Paris Commune in 1849. 
As the Revolution of 1789 is to be traced to the op- 
pression of the peasantry by feudal insolence, never 
weary in wrong-doing, as described by Boisguilbert 
and Mirabeau pere, so the new revolutionary move- 
ment of the close of the nineteenth century has its 
origin in the oppression of the artisan class by the 
new aristocracy, the hourgeosie. Factory owners 
and millionaires have taken the place of the noblesse 
of last century. And the sufferings of the prole- 
tariat, peasant and artisan alike, have increased with 
their numbers. Freedom has taught the myriads of 
workers new desires. Heightened intelligence has 
given them the power to contrast their own 
wretchedness with the seeming happiness of others, 
and a standard by which to measure their own degra- 
dation, and to sound the depths of their own despair. 
Marx's greatest work. Das Kapital, published in 
1867, was to the new revolution just such an inspira- 
tion and guide as the Contrat Social of Rousseau 
was to the revolution of '89. The brilliant genius 
of Lassalle yielded to the sway of the principle of 
Nationality, and ultimately of Empire, as strongly 
as the narrower and gloomier nature of Marx was 
repelled by these principles. It was this trait in 
his writings, as well as the fiery energy of his soul 
and his faith in the Prussian peasant and the 



264 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

Prussian artisan, that attracted for a time the inter- 
est of Bismarck. Even a State such as Austria 
Lassalle regarded as higher than any federal union 
whatever. The image of Lassalle's character, his 
philosophy, and too swift career, may be found in 
his earliest work, Heradeitus, the god-gifted states- 
man whom Plato delineated, seeking not his own, 
but realising his life in that of others, toiling cease- 
lessly for the oppressed, the dumb, helpless, leader- 
less masses who suffer silently, yet know not why 
they suffer. A monarchy resting upon the support 
of the artisan-myriads against the arrogance of the 
bourgeois, as the Tudor monarchy rested upon the 
support of the yeomen and the towns against the 
arrogance of the feudal barons — this, in the most 
effective period of his career, was Lassalle's ideal 
State. And it is his remarkable pamphlet in reply 
to the deputation from Leipsic in 1863 that has fitly 
been characterised as the charter of the whole move- 
ment of democratic socialism in Germany down to 
the present hour. 

The Revolution of 1848 revealed to European 
Liberalism a more formidable adversary than Met- 
ternich. The youth of Nicholas I had been formed 
by the same tutors as that of his elder brother, the 
Czar Alexander, The Princess Lieven and his 
mother, Maria Federovna, the friend of Stein, and 
the implacable enemy of Napoleon, had found in 
him a pupil at once devoted, imaginative, and un- 
wearied. A resolute will, dauntless courage, a love 



MODERN REPUBLICANISM 265 

of the beautiful in nature and in art, a high-souled 
enthusiasm for his country, made him seem the fate- 
appointed leader of Russia's awakening energies. 
The Teuton in his blood effaced the Slav, and the 
fixed, the unrelenting pursuit of one sole purpose 
gives his career something of the tragic unity of 
Napoleon's, and leaves him still the supreme type of 
the Russian autocrat. One God, one law, one 
Church, one State, Russian in language, Russian in 
creed, Russian in all the labyrinthine grades of its 
civic, military, and municipal life — this was the 
dream to the realisation of which the thirty crowded 
years of his reign were consecrated. There is 
grandeur as well as swiftness of decision in the man- 
ner in which he encounters and quells the insurrec- 
tion of the 26th December. Then, true to the im- 
memorial example of tyrants, he found employment 
for sedition in war. He tore from Persia in a single 
campaign two rich provinces and an indemnity of 
20,ooo,cxx) roubles. The mystic Liberalism of 
Alexander was abandoned. The free constitution 
of Poland, the eyesore of the boyards and the old 
Russian party, was overthrown, and a Russian, as 
distinct from a German, policy was welcomed with 
surprise and tumultuous delight. " Despotism," he 
declared, "is the principle of my government; my 
people desires no other." Yet he endeavoured to 
win young Russia by flattery, as he had conquered 
old Russia by reaction. He encouraged the move- 
ment in poetry against the tasteless imitation of 



266 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

Western models, and in society against the domi- 
nance of the French language. In the first years of 
his reign French ceases to be a medium of literary 
expression, and Russian prose and Russian verse ac- 
quire their own cadences. Yet liberty is the life- 
blood of art; and liberty he could not grant. The 
freedom of the Press was interdicted; liberty of 
speech forbidden, and a strict censorship, exercised 
by the dullest of officials, stifled literature. " How 
unfortunate is this Bonaparte!" a wit remarked 
when Pichegru was found strangled on the floor of 
his dungeon, " all his prisoners die on his hands." 
How unfortunate was the Czar Nicholas! All his 
men of genius died by violent deaths. Lermontofif 
and Poushkine fell in duels before antagonists who 
represented the tchinovnik class. Rileyev died on 
the scaffold; Griboiedov was assassinated at Tehe- 
ran. 

His foreign policy was a return to that of Cather- 
ine the Great — the restoration of the Byzantine 
Empire. Making admirable use of the Hellenic en- 
thusiasm of Canning, he destroyed the Turkish fleet 
at Navarino. Thus popular at home and abroad, 
regarded by the Liberals of Europe as the restorer 
of Greek freedom, and by the Legitimists as a 
stronger successor to Alexander, he was able to 
crush the Poles. Enthusiastic Berlin students car- 
ried the effigies of Polish leaders in triumph; but not 
a sword was drawn. England, France, Austria 
looked on silent at the work of Diebitch and 



MODERN REPUBLICANISM 267 

Paskievitch, " my two mastiffs," as the Czar styled 
them, and the true "' finis Polonies " had come. A 
Russian Army marching against Kossuth, and the 
Czar's demand for the extradition of the heroic 
Magyar, unmasked the despot. Yet his European 
triumph was complete, and the war in the Crimea 
seemed his crowning chance — the humiliating of 
the two Powers which in his eyes represented 
Liberty and the Revolution. Every force that per- 
sonal rancour, and the devotion of years to one sole 
end, every measure that reason and State policy 
could dictate, lent their aid to stimulate the efforts 
of the monarch in this enterprise. The disaster was 
sudden, overwhelming, irremediable. Yet in one 
thing his life was a success, and that a great one — 
he had Russianised Russia. 

The Crimean War marks a turning-point in the 
History of Europe only less significant than the 
Revolution of 1848. The isolating force of religion 
was annulled, and the slowly increasing influence 
of the East upon the West affected even the routine 
of diplomacy. The hopes of the Carlists and the 
Jesuits in Spain were frustrated, and Austria, de- 
prived of the reward of her neutrality, could look 
no more to the Muscovite for aid in crushing Italian 
freedom, as she had crushed Hungary, From his 
deep chagrin at the treason of the Powers, Cavour 
seemed to gather new strength and a political wis- 
dom which sets his name with those of the greatest 
constructive statesmen of all time. The defeat at 



268 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

Novara was avenged, the policy of Villa franca, and 
the designs of that singular saviour of society, 
Louis Napoleon, v^ere checked. Venetia was recov- 
ered, and when in 1870 the lines around Metz and 
Sedan withdrew the French bayonets which hedged 
in Pio Nono, Victor Emmanuel entered Rome as 
King of Italy. Thirty years have passed since the 
20th September, and the burdens of taxation and 
military sacrifices which Italy has borne, with the 
prisoner in the Vatican like a conspirator on her 
own hearth, can be compared only with the burdens 
which Prussia endured for the sake of glory and her 
kings before and after Rossbach. But instead of 
a Rossbach, Italy has had an Adowa; instead of 
justice, a corrupt official class and an army of judges 
who make justice a mockery, anarchism in her 
towns, a superstitious peasantry, an aristocracy dead 
to the future and to the memory of the past. This 
heroic patriotism, steadfast patience, and fortitude 
in disaster have their roots in the noblest hearts 
of Italy herself, but there is not one which in the 
trial hour has not felt its own strength made 
stronger, its own resolution made loftier, by the 
genius and example of a single man — Giuseppe 
Mazzini. To modern Republicanism, not only of 
Italy, but of Europe, Mazzini gave a higher faith 
and a watchword that is great as the watchwords 
of the world. Equal rights mean equal duties. 
The Rights of Man imply the Duties of Man. He 
taught the millions of workers in Italy that their 



MODERN REPUBLICANISM 269 

life-purpose lay not in the extortion of privileges, 
but in making themselves worth)'- of those. privileges; 
that it was not in conquering capitalists that the path 
of victory lay, but in all classes of Italians striving 
side by side towards a common end, the beauty and 
freedom of Italy, by establishing freedom and 
beauty in the soul. 

The movement towards unity in Germany is old 
as the war of Liberation against Napoleon, old as 
Luther's appeal to the German Princes in 1520. 
The years following Leipsic were consumed by Ger- 
man Liberalism in efforts to invent a constitution 
like that of England. It was the happy period of 
the doctrinaire, of the pedant, and of the student of 
1688 and the pupils of Sieyes. Heine's bitter ad- 
dress to Germany, " Dream on, thou son of Folly, 
dream on ! " sprang from a chagrin which every 
sincere German, Prussian, Bavarian, Wiirtemberger, 
or Rheinlander felt not less deeply. The Revolu- 
tion of 1848, the blood spilt at the barricades in the 
streets of Vienna and Berlin, did not end this ; but it 
roused the better spirits amongst the opposition to 
deeper perception of the aspiration of all Germany. 
Which of the multifarious kingdoms and duchies 
could form the centre of a new union, federal or 
imperial? Austria, with her long line of Hapsburg 
monarchs, her tyranny, her obscurantism, her 
tenacious hold upon the past, had been the enemy or 
the oppressor of every State in turn. The Danu- 
bian principalities, Bohemia, Hungary, pointed out 



270 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

to Vienna a task in the future calculated to try her 
declining energy to the utmost. Prussia alone 
possessed the heroic past, the memory of Frederick, 
of Bliicher, of Stein, Scharnhorst, and Yorck; and, 
if politically despotic, she was essentially Protes- 
tant in religion, and Protestantism offered the hope 
of religious tolerance. After Austria's defeat in 
Italy, the issue north of the Alps was inevitable. 
The question was how and in what shape the end 
would realise itself. Montesquieu insists that, even 
without Caius Julius, the fall of the oligarchy and 
the establishment of the Roman Empire was fixed as 
by a law of fate. Yet, with data before us, it is 
hard to imagine the creation of the new German 
Empire without Bismarck. His downright Prus- 
sianism rises like a rock through the mists, amid the 
vaporous Liberalism of the pre-Revolutionary 
period. His unbroken resolution gave strength to 
the wavering purpose of Frederick William IV. 
His diplomacy led to Koniggratz, and the manipu- 
lated telegram from Ems turned, as Moltke said, a 
retreat into a call to battle. And in front of Metz 
his wisdom kept the Bavarian legions in the field. 
From his first definite entry into a State career in 
1848 to the dismissal of 1887, his deep religion, wis- 
dom, and simplicity of nature are as distinctly Prus- 
sian as the glancing ardour of Skobeleff is distinctly 
Russian. From the Hohenzolleni he looked for no 
gratitude. His loyalty was loyalty to the kingship, 
not to the individual. He had early studied the 



MODERN REPUBLICANISM 271 

career of Strafford, and knew the value of the word 
of a King. False or true to all men else, he was 
unwaveringly true to Prussia, which to Bismarck 
meant being true to himself, true to God. He could 
not bequeath his secret to those who came after him 
any more than Leonardo could bequeath his secret 
to Luini. But the Empire he built up has the ele- 
ments of endurance. It possesses in the Middle 
Age common traditions, deep and penetrating, a 
common language, and the ,recent memory of a 
marvellous triumph. Protestantism and the Prus- 
sian temper ensure religious freedom to Bavaria. 
Even in 1870 the old principles of the Seven Years' 
War, Protestantism and the neo-Romanism of Pius 
IX, reappear in the opposing ranks at Gravelotte and 
Sedan. The new Empire, whether it be to Europe a 
warrant of peace or of war, is at least a bulwark 
against Ultramontanism. 

The change in French political life finds its ex- 
pression in the Russian alliance. Time has atoned 
for the disasters at the Alma and Inkermann. 
Would one discover the secret at the close of the 
century of the alliance of Russia and France, free- 
dom's forlorn hope when the century began? It 
is contained in the speech of Skobeleff which once 
startled Europe : " The struggle between the Slav 
and the Teuton no human power can avert. Even 
now it is near, and the struggle will be long, terrible, 
and bloody; but this alone can liberate Russia and 
the whole Slavonic race from the tyranny of the 



2^2 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

intruder. No man's home is a home till the German 
has been expelled, and the rush to the East, the 
' Drang nach Osten ' turned back for ever." 

§ 3. THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE 

In modern Europe political revolutions have inva- 
riably been preceded or accompanied by revolutions 
in thought or religion. The nineteenth century, 
v^hich has been convulsed by thirty-three revolu- 
tions, the overthrow of dynasties, and the assassi- 
nation of kings, has also been characterised by the 
range and daring of its speculative inquiry. Every 
system of thought which has perplexed or enthralled 
the imagination of man, every faith that has exalted 
or debased his intelligence, has had in this age its 
adherents. The Papacy in each successive decade 
has gained by this tumult and mental disquietude. 
Thought is anguish to the masses of men, any drug 
is precious, and to escape from its misery the soul 
conspires against her own excellence and the perfec- 
tion of Nature. Even in 1802 Napoleon in his 
Hamlet-like musings in the Tuileries despaired of 
Liberty as the safety of the world, and in his tragic 
course this despair adds a metaphysical touch to 
his doom. Five Popes have succeeded him who 
anointed Bonaparte, and the very era of Darwin 
and Strauss has been illustrated or derided by the 
bull, " Inejfahilis Deus," the Council of the Vatican, 
the thronged pilgrimages, to Lourdes, and the neo- 



THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE 273 

Romanism of French litterateurs. The Hellenism 
of Goethe was a protest against this movement, 
at once in its intellectual and its literary forms, the 
Romanticism of Tieck and Novalis, the cultured 
pietism of Lammenais and Chateaubriand. Yet in 
Faust Goethe attempted a reconciliation of Hellas 
and the Middle Age, and the work is not only the 
supreme literary achievement of the century, but 
its greatest prophetic book. Then science became 
the ally of poetry and speculative thought in the 
war against Obscurantism, Ultramontanism, and 
Jesuitism in all its forms. Geology flung back the 
seons of the past till they receded beyond imagina- 
tion's wing. Astronomy peopled with a myriad 
suns the infinite solitudes of space. The theory 
of evolution stirred the common heart of Europe 
to a fury of debate upon questions confined till 
then to the studious calm of the few. The ardour 
to know all, to be all, to do all, here upon earth and 
now, which the nineteenth century had inherited 
from the Renaissance, quickened every inventive 
faculty of man, and surprise has followed surprise. 
The aspirations of the Revolutionary epoch towards 
some ideal of universal humanity, its sympathy with 
the ideals of all the past, Hellas, Islam, the Middle 
Age, received from the theories of science, and 
from increased facilities of communication and loco- 
motion, a various and most living impulse. As 
man to the European imagination became isolated 
in space, and the earth a point lost in the sounding 



274 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

vastness of the atom-shower of the worlds, he also 
became conscious to himself as one. The bounds 
of the earth, his habitation, drew nearer as the stars 
receded, and surveying the past, his history seemed 
less a withdrawal from the Divine than an ever- 
deepening of the presence of the Divine within the 
soul. 

That which in speculation pre-eminently distin- 
guishes the Europe of the nineteenth century from 
preceding centuries — the gradually increasing 
dominion of Oriental thought, art, and action — has 
strengthened this impression. An age mystic in its 
religion, symbolic in its art, and in its politics apath- 
etic or absolutist, succeeds an age of formal re- 
ligion, conventional art, and Republican enthusi- 
asm. Goethe in 1809, from the overthrow of dynas- 
ties and the crash of thrones, turned to the East and 
found peace. What were the armies of Napoleon 
and the ruin of Europe's dream tO' Hafiz and Sadi, 
and to the calm of the trackless centuries far be- 
hind? The mood of Goethe has become the char- 
acteristic of the art, the poetry, the speculation of 
the century's end. The bizarre genius of Nietzsche, 
whose whole position is implicit in Goethe's Divan, 
popularised it in Germany. The youngest of litera- 
tures, Norway and Russia, reveal its power as 
vividly as the oldest, Italy and France. It controls 
the meditative depth of Leopardi, the melancholy 
of Tourgenieff, the nobler of Ibsen's dramas, and 
the cadenced prose of Flaubert. It informs the 



THE IDEALS OF A NEW AGE 275 

teaching of Tolstoi and the greater art of Tschai- 
kowsky. Goethe, at the beginning of the century, 
moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and 
of Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in Tristan 
and in Parsifal, has woven the Oriental and the 
mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the Minne- 
singer's lays and the mystic vision of the Upanishads 
into a rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its 
rivals, the masterpieces of Beethoven, Schubert, 
Brahms, and Tschaikowksy, make this century the 
Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the 
Periclean age of painting, and the sixteenth of 
poetry. 

What a vision of the new age thus opens before 
the gaze! The ideal of Liberty and all its hopes 
have turned to ashes; but out of the ruins Europe, 
tireless in the pursuit of the Ideal, ponders even now 
some pro founder mystery, some mightier destiny. 
More than any race known to history the Teuton has 
the power of making other religions, other thoughts, 
other arts his own, and sealing them with the im- 
press of his own spirit. The poetry of Shakespeare, 
of Goethe, the tone-dramas of Wagner attest this. 
Out of the thought and faith of Judaea and Hellas, 
of Egypt and Rome, the Teutonic imagination has 
carved the present. Their ideals have passed into 
his life imperishably. But the purple fringe of an- 
other dawn is on the horizon. Teutonic heroism 
and resolution in action, transformed by the cen- 
turies behind and the ideals of the elder races, con- 



276 NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE 

front now, creative, the East, its mighty calm, its 
resignation, its scorn of action and the famihar aims 
of men, its inward vision, its deep disdain of realised 
ends. What vistas arise before the mind which 
seeks to penetrate the future of this union! The 
eighteenth century at its close coincided with an ac- 
complished hope clearly defined. The last sun of 
the dying century goes down upon a world brood- 
ing over an unsolved enigma, pursuing an ideal it 
but darkly discerns. 






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